














^ o 

5 N 0 ' o* 

V ^ jV * 

* - r 


Pv"> : > 0<? * v'^m- &' 

/ ,-•/% ' >•'/<• ^ 

A^ S ^ . , v <alf , -<C?^»v *" , 

l'> •* .[A ($£,//, A“> * o •■i’i. c" 

*•*» -£x'-,iv ?° 'OT: •Vv' 

j* V< V - ’spfiKr’. ° # <*• ~ A ' " 

•» ^ \S3$ts & « -, w 4 

(. > .X ^/ V?^-> ~ *V * -^TSrv * '^J w 

^ ^sNAV^ ^ ^ 

> 0e> - : 11 ®: ?** * 

V/'iV' \/'»^o>* . 0 5 %'%'S.'*/^ "V 

v x .-' V/* •> s < 3 > „'*«,% " v\-' V> " 

^ *'■' 'Kt c.- *- ^Tvs^'/k^ \\> * <■ 

■ ^ **. r #■ ° * <r 

c+ >k 

O 

. -*■ 




*> • v x 
^ <\V * 

</> ,^V w 


* 


!//y^b> * -A\ ~ <; 

f ®< 

’ s - rf. 

>*.,o° °o '- 


W 


, IVv is* S '" <*■ c 

^ ^ rO CV *• 

* 0 S 0 vA 

• o^ 9 ^ ® /• 

^ </r ,VV/"' ^ .Vi v « 


,° ^ 


^ v" VH - ■» 

V " & * * * ° 















V » o 


"• * ft 7 


V ^ 



* 4 ^ 

- vV V' 

Tf^'V * 

" 1 . \ (, <M> f ' • 

v 

. v jjbwfctL. * 



* v ■>*. ‘Ass?* .<?■ ^ ^ 

* K \ > O s A 0 y n ' '* A 

.C',\ v* l,, S% ./ .c»" c «,\ '* 

° /KC^#<7* 1 r5 r\' _ •< V- ^ o Av^mL^ ' 

<1 




o V^ /J V' a> * <j 

°*. *.,.»' / s „„, -e. ♦,„.’ 

\ S> V v'lftj*, ^ _ A° 

i_ ^ AS ^ ^\Sr**rO^; <* *>*. ,**A 






^ - 'Kj ^Jr*Sia* * „v ^ '-S 

* \ v ^o, ^T^A ,G X <• 

A .»«, -^'**' o* . l, *«, ^ 

^ fg’rfly??!- + 

J- 

\0 o 

\ X<. ^ 


<£ ■ 
-7 -vp 

, •p ' ^ 

V** ; ' # >°\ 

> a V T- 

K * '*A c_A <* 

|^ v - 
0 > </> 

* # ^ 




► X s /\ o, '/, ~ S , 0’ a 7 0 • X ’ V x v, ^ < 3 , 

0 N c . *^_ ■* * * S _-N I I fi . f 0 N C /) 

o * * A. -/■ *■ * 

+ ^M** & ^ wS ° i*\ . ™ 

C <O ^ ff * ^ % -s® -O' C b + 811 ° 

* », -V ' 1 V V sVV U "■> ° - 0 .o'- „-»,•% 
xV ^ ;^,. /= 

r^* f ^ # v -\ % 

A 0 . I, C 'l.l* a A «, ■ 3 ., < ’ 8 ., ( ' 

, 0 ^ s® '' % •%, ^ c"" 1 ^ 'o. fO^,*' 

g* - V* • -v^%: "b o' .' 

•--• * c wyI -' t 


-VJ • 
Vj >> 


' 8 « 


rU y ^ys"* <t c\ r~> i. 

^ ^ *J s 0 * g ■ \ ° A 1 ' 

* ^ > v 0 r *°s ^C> \> " s 

c A 



« 5 > ° 

* A/ ^ 


x 































Rider in the Sun 



~k/ah,u 



£ 


61TfVUsYi 6 


/} 


Rider in the Sun 



Edmund Ware 


> 





Boston 

Lothrop, Lee and Shepard Company 

1935 

















Copyright, 1935, by 


/ 


LOTHROP, LEE AND SHEPARD COMPANY 

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be re¬ 
produced in any form without permission in writing 
from the publisher, except by a reviewer who wishes 
to quote brief passages in connection with a review 
written for inclusion in magazine or newspaper. 


Published May, 1935 


PRINTED IN THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA 




81832 



MAY 141935 , 


:> 


To 

Katharine Ware Smith 

















Rider in the Sun 


Chapter One 

1 

T HE boy was afraid. The deed he planned 
outgrew his strength. The darkness whis¬ 
pered no encouragement. 

To-morrow he would run away from home. 
To-morrow when the stars came, all familiar 
things would be behind him: father, mother, the 
bed he lay upon, the roof which sheltered him and 
smelled so wonderfully of cedar. 

He felt small in his bed. He heard the twitter 
of a drowsing bird, the moisture falling inter¬ 
mittently from trees, remote tendrils of music 
from young frogs in the swamp land. The 
mouths which shaped the meanings of the night 
breathed endlessly the litany of spring. 

The boy felt that the world was gigantic. Its 
dimensions terrified him. It did not once pause 
in its seven-leagued stride to acknowledge him. 
Onward it whirled, forever restless in space, for¬ 
ever brooding in the shackles of its orbit. His 

9 


RIDER IN THE SUN 


plan to run away seemed pitiful to him now. He 
was about to embark for the wild places of the 
earth and the earth did not care. 

Aspects of home which he had long taken for 
granted isolated themselves in his mind and took 
sharp meaning: the fireplace before which he had 
listened to his father’s stories and his mother’s 
careful reading; the rugs familiar to his feet; the 
scenes from windows where each year he watched 
the seasons ebb and flow; the clean scrubbed wood 
of the kitchen table; the shape and motion of 
his mother’s hands; her work basket, Gorgon¬ 
headed with washed stockings. 

Across the hall, his father and mother were 
sleeping. The most unchanging influence in his 
life was his mother. She was steadfast, like the 
mountains. She loved him quietly. She guided 
him along a course almost as if her arms were 
stretched parallel and he, between them, marching 
on. 

She taught him courageously, undespairingly. 
She tolerated no shirking, no swerving from the 
text, no dreaming over the task in hand. Fre¬ 
quently she helped him with his school work. She 
knew the instant that his glance strayed from 
the page. “Dan, dear. You’re not thinking . 

10 


RIDER IN THE SUN 


You’re jiot listening. You’re wool-gathering. 
This comes first.” 

It was different when he studied with his 
father. In recent years they had read books 
together and in their conversations championed 
the heroes. Sometimes they would discard the 
heroes of the books and devise their own fear¬ 
less men, sending them forth into dangers. 
Always these men knew what to do in emergencies 
and they did it. They trod bloody decks in the 
name of right or they rode black horses. Some¬ 
times a hero entered battle in burnished armor. 
Sometimes, naked to the waist, he used a cutlass. 
Of late, there was one who lay on the brink of a 
canon wall with a rifle beside him. 

Deepest, most carefully concealed, most in¬ 
vulnerable in the boy’s imagination was the char¬ 
acter of whom his father once told great tales 
at bed time. This had been long ago. His father 
had invented the rider on the tall horse. The 
rider’s deeds, his indomitability, his spirit, filled 
the child’s mind. He had no name except “The 
Rider in the Sun,” and to him nothing was im¬ 
possible. He could not be dismayed. He was as 
valorous as a myth, as powerful as an oak, as 
good as Galahad. 


11 


RIDER IN THE SUN 


Each tale Dan’s father told involved a quest. 
Perhaps the Rider searched for a god, a gold 
mine or for dragons. Sometimes he rode in 
shadow, sometimes in sun, sometimes in deep 
woods where no fences ran. The Rider sym¬ 
bolized achievement. He became a misty ideal, 
and all destiny concerned him. , 

His father, on those nights long gone, would 
come on tiptoe into the room to say good night. 
“Tell about him, father.” 

Always in the same way, his father would 
begin: “He rode a black horse. The horse 
could run faster than any other horse, because his 
muscles were long and sinewy; and the sunlight 
gleamed on his dark silky coat. The rider 
stopped his horse on a high place, and he looked 
across to another high place which was miles and 
miles beyond, so that the mountains looked blue. 
For a long time the Rider looked at these moun¬ 
tains thinking they might be the homes of rain¬ 
bows, and then he said to the black horse: ‘Come 
on. JVe’ll go,’ and he tightened his reins, and 
he drew a deep breath, and he put his feet far into 

the stirrups and started-” 

At some point along the way of the Rider’s 
limitless journey, the boy’s mother would come 

12 



RIDER IN THE SUN 


into the room and say: “It’s time to go to sleep.” 

Dan would start up, imploring: “Not yeti 
Just a little while more. An awful little while.” 

“No more.” 

The boy would sigh in the way that people 
sigh when a curtain falls upon a stage and they 
see the reality that fences them. 

Dan’s father and mother would kiss him good 
night and close the door, leaving him to imagine 
the outcome of the story. He would drift toward 
sleep while the sound of hoof beats dimmed in his 
ears, and horse tracks vanished in a distance 
grown hazy and improbable. But the form of 
the Rider remained invincible, like designs of 
trees against the sky. 


2 


The boy’s destination, in running away from 
home, was as vague and compelling as the point 
where sea and sky converge. He wanted to do 
the deeds he most admired. He wanted to in¬ 
spect his courage. He wanted strength in his 

13 


RIDER IN THE SUN 


long thin arms. He wanted to prove himself 
capable of deeds among men, and he wanted to 
ride a tall horse in a wild country. 

He looked upon all horses as opportunity. He 
had ridden an assorted lot of them — plodders, 
plebians, pensioners of the breed. He loved them 
in a secret and religious way. While he rode, 
he would sometimes question the horse and invent 
the perfect answer, so that he felt in some meas¬ 
ure the poise of a good king, and the sensations 
of two lives. 

He saw himself, stern and solemn, riding in 
a smoky land of cactus and sagebrush; great 
wastes of yellow country; far-flung trails where 
all men rode, where they rode with their heads 
thrust forward in defiance of whatever storms 
might be. 

School held no such pictures. Fashioned to 
the ends of the earthly, school was a level, day¬ 
light business. In school you started and stopped 
at the commands of bells which sounded ar¬ 
rogantly in corridors, and you listened to the 
droning of gray bespectacled people. 

But that land out there! That shining point 
in distance which beckoned with happenings! It 
seemed a valid clear-cut need. Like all things 

14 


RIDER IN THE SUN 


worth while, it contained a struggle, a conquest 
and a rest. 

The boy had picked a spot on a map where 
towns were few. He had drawn his savings 
from the bank. He had made stern prepara¬ 
tions. He had taken a last long ride on a bor¬ 
rowed horse, and his blood had pounded until he 
laughed, and he thought he feared nothing. 

But now it was night, and the nearness of de¬ 
parture frightened him. The world seemed for¬ 
midable and implacable, for he would soon be 
alone with his own footprints. Searching for a 
spark which might rekindle his bravery, he re¬ 
membered that yesterday in church the minister 
had said: “Be not afraid 1 Be not afraid I” He 
repeated these safe words frowningly. “Be not 
afraid 1” He did not then know that such counsel 
is most glibly given by one leaning securely upon 
God’s shoulder. He went confidently to sleep. 


3 


At breakfast, a spasm of excitement stirred 
his heart. Across the table from him sat his 

15 


RIDER IN THE SUN 


father. His mother stood by the stove. Soon 
he would be saying good-bye, and they would not 
know the depth and sadness of his farewell. 

His father got up and stood back of his chair 
while he folded his napkin. He looked at his 
watch, drank a glass of water and went out into 
the front hall where he got his coat and hat. 
Then he came back into the kitchen to say 
good-bye. He was very cheerful. He bent and 
kissed the top of Dan’s head. 

Dan’s hair, bleached by sun and wind, cast a 
faint yellow glow like a lamp in the daytime. 
He looked up at his father, his blue eyes dark and 
still: “Good-bye.” 

“Good-bye, Dan.” 

The boy wondered if he would forget how his 
father looked. He tried to bring all his devotion 
and gratitude to bear intensely upon his farewell, 
hoping that his father in some unworded way 
would understand: “Good-bye.” 

His father looked again at his watch and turned 
to the stove. Dan’s mother was spooning hot 
water over an egg poaching in a pan. 

“Good-bye, dear,” he said. 

She kissed him. “Don’t forget the news¬ 
papers, will you?” 


16 


RIDER IN THE SUN 


“I always bring them, don’t I?” 

“No, dear. You just bring them sometimes.” 

They were smiling at each other. Dan felt 
them draw apart from him. They were not 
thinking of him at all, but he was thinking of 
them so intensely that he feared they might feel 
his thoughts and come rushing to him. He was 
afraid to look at them. 

His father glanced at the alarm clock on the 
shelf above the stove. “Is that right?” 

“Yes, I set it with the seven o’clock whistle.” 

“I’ll be late.” 

“I called you in plenty of time.” 

He kissed her again and went marching out, 
closing the front door vigorously. He always 
started off to catch his train this way, somehow 
with the impressiveness of a launched ship or a 
soldier off to war. 

Dan listened to his father’s footsteps on the 
gravel walk. Soon the footsteps of other hurry¬ 
ing people obscured them, but the sound of his 
father’s steps remained, a cherished echo. 

The boy’s head bent forward, his glances roving 
swiftly among accustomed objects. It frightened 
him to think that he might miss them. He knew 
that in the lands ahead they would all be un- 

17 


RIDER IN THE SUN 


reachable, unknowable, like clouds, or the texture 
of leaves. 

His mother slid the poached egg on to a piece 
of buttered toast. She poured herself a cup of 
coffee, brought it to the table, and sat down op¬ 
posite him. She put a spoonful of sugar into the 
coffee and stirred it idly. She looked up at Dan 
and found him staring at her. She stopped 
stirring. “What is the hypotenuse?” she asked. 

He gazed as if he had not heard. 

“What is the hypotenuse of a triangle?” 

“I don’t know. I don’t even care.” 

“Tell me, Dan. You’ve forgotten.” 

His lips were unsteady. “It’s the long side 
of the triangle.” 

“And the square of the hypotenuse equals — ?” 

“What difference does it make now?” 

“Tell me.” 

“The sum of the squares of the other two 
sides.” 

“That’s right.” She noticed that he was not 
eating. “Isn’t your egg all right?” 

“Yes,” he said. “It’s all right.” He began 
to eat it. Its goldness seemed to have been 
created especially for him through some miracle 
wrought by his mother’s hands. It was the same 

18 


RIDER IN THE SUN 


with his toast and his cereal. They, the warm 
kitchen, the cupboard, his mother’s face — every¬ 
thing he saw took on a quiet nobility, shaming his 
horde of reasons for running away. He finished 
his breakfast and stood up, dropping his crumpled 
napkin beside his plate. 

“You’ve forgotten to fold your napkin.” 

He started, folded it clumsily. His mother 
seemed to see completely through him into his 
heart yet her look was precisely the look she had 
given him every day when he was about to leave 
for school. It was a slow, straight look, a look 
of inspection and estimate. 

“You’d better run along,” she said. 

He took a step toward her. She could not 
know what she was saying to him. She touched 
her lips with her napkin and looked up at him. 
He saw every wrinkle in her face unforgettably. 
He bent over and kissed her. “Good-bye, 
mother.” Her hand rested on his shoulder, and, 
as he straightened, clung a moment and slid down 
over his arm. “Good-bye.” 

He took his books and walked into the front 
hall. He opened the door, stepped onto the ver¬ 
anda and looked out at the morning. Across 
the street he saw a friend starting off to school. 

19 


RIDER IN THE SUN 


The friend waved a greeting, and shouted: 
“Coming?” 

“Not yet.” 

“I’ll wait.” 

“You better go ahead. I’ll be late.” 

The friend went on with hurrying steps. For 
an instant Dan wanted to be his friend, to think 
his friend’s thoughts, to feel as he felt — gay, 
confident, and bound for school. The sound of 
whistling floated back. 

Dan opened the front door and stepped into 
the hall. He stood there a moment, breathing 
uncertainly. Then he walked into the kitchen 
and stood beside his mother. 

“What’s the trouble?” 

“Nothing. Forgot my books.” 

“You had them when you went out.” 

“I must of left them in the front hall.” 

“Silly,” she said. “Run along. Good-bye.” 

He moved a little closer to her. “Good-bye, 
mother.” 

He made no move to go. Her eyes lifted to 
his in a clean, brisk interrogation: “Do you want 
to be late to school?” 

His whole face lighted with gladness. “I 
knew you were going to say that!” 

20 


RIDER IN THE SUN 


4 


He was walking in the street away from home, 
and he noticed that part of the sky had darkened 
with a rain cloud. Thinly aware of the cloud, 
he turned off on a dirt road which ran through 
woods, across a bridge and in a roundabout way 
to the railroad station. 

At the bridge he stopped to look up and down 
the road. No one was in sight. With a jerk 
of his arm he flung his books over the bridge 
into the black river. 

A fine warm rain swept his face. He grinned, 
taunting in his mind all things relative to books, 
triangles and unusable languages. His face 
widened in a smile. At the touch of the rain, and 
of the earth under his feet, a small ecstasy awoke 
in him. He strode toward the railroad station. 
From a little distance he saw the brilliant row of 
war posters paneling its walls. The posters 
showed men against odds and unafraid; men doing 
deeds; men who were perfect in their proportions 
and divine in the certainty that they were right. 

21 


RIDER IN THE SUN 


He turned from them into the station, and at 
a ticket window bought the passage to his own 
more intimate war. Already he could hear deep 
drumbeats in his heart and victory was in his 
mind. 

It was raining hard, and the smoke of engines 
hung low along the tracks. He got aboard the 
west-bound train. He heard the conductor 
shout: “Bo-o-o-o-o-rd!” 

From the car window he looked down upon 
the platform and saw an old lady hunched under 
her umbrella. She walked slowly and carefully, 
her eyes intent upon some alarming puddles. He 
did not know her name but he had seen her so 
constantly about town that she seemed a distinct 
part of his life. “I won’t see the old lady any 
more.” 

He felt the train jerk. The platform appeared 
to move so that the old lady walked in a futile 
way as ypon a treadmill. She kept losing ground 
and finally was too far behind for him to see. 

Through the upper reaches of town the train 
gathered headway. He noticed factories with 
tall familiar stacks, a pond gray and brooding 
under the low damp sky. He saw wet streets 
where he had tramped with friends. . . . 

22 


Chapter Two 

1 


N OBODY knew the boy, nobody at all. He 
sat on a hitch rail in front of a store in a 
shadeless western town. Dust and sand swirled 
about him in the wind. He knew now that the 
wind did not fall from gust to friendly breeze the 
way it did around home. Here the wind blew 
gustily forever. It howled an oath of loneliness 
and made all thoughts of God seem tired and un¬ 
tenable. 

There had been long nights and days on as¬ 
sorted trains. He had seen a thousand towns, 
a million people who did not speak. His ears 
were thick with the sound of the trains and the 
silence of the people. 

On the outer edges of his vision he caught a 
startling motion and glanced up to see a man 
riding along the street. The man was amazingly 
supple, splendidly proportioned. The sounds of 
his horse’s hoofs were secret in the sand. 


23 


RIDER IN THE SUN 


The boy strained forward. This was what he 
had come so far to see. He would ride a horse 
as wonderful as that! He had dreamed of 
sitting recklessly astride a silver-mounted saddle, 
of appearing to others as the riding man appeared 
to him. 

The rider held the bridle reins loosely in his 
left hand. The horse was a tall blue roan whose 
hoofs touched the ground with mirage-like light¬ 
ness. The rider’s black hat slanted over his 
eyes, and the jingle of his rein-chains was bright. 
In a moment he was close, so close that Dan saw 
every detail of his riding gear. In the next 
moment he was gone, and the wind returned laden 
with the faint creaking of his saddle and the odor 
of leather and mystery. 

Dan frowned at the dust which came in thick 
puffs, making him squint his eyes. A bay team 
approached, drawing a long box wagon. A 
man sat swaying in the driver’s seat. He was 
an unimportant man compared to the rider. The 
long heels of his boots were hooked over the 
dash rail, and his elbows rested on his knees. He 
handled the team with unconscious skill, and 
above the rattling of the wheels and the rumble 
of the wagon, Dan could hear him humming a 

24 


RIDER IN THE SUN 


frayed tune. As he passed, he looked down and 
winked. Dan stared. The wagon rocked on 
down the street. The brown dust frolicked 
along. 

Across the street a door banged. A woman 
with big hands came from the post office. In one 
hand she held a letter. She tore an end from the 
envelope and it sailed jerkily in the wind. Un¬ 
folding the letter, she walked slowly away, read¬ 
ing as she walked. Once she stopped. Her lips 
moved as if at some appalling news in the letter. 

“Maybe I ought to write,” he thought. Days 
had gone, and his father and mother did not know 
where he was. They might think he had been 
killed. He looked at the post office door. He 
dropped from the hitch rail to the ground. 
Stretching his arms and legs, and brushing at his 
wrinkled clothes, he walked across the street. 


Dear Mother and Father: 

I could not stand school any more. Of 
course you will think I am crazy and ungrate¬ 
ful to you, but I am not. I do not know when 
I will be home but probably in a few years. 
Please do not worry about me, and please do 

25 


RIDER IN THE SUN 


not chase me or try to make me come home. I 
could not have passed geometry. So that was 
another reason. So I went away. I am all 
right here. I like the names of the towns here. 
I went through a town named Broken Hand. 
Do not worry about me. I am going to be rid¬ 
ing horses. 

I will be in this town quite a while. 

Dan 


He dropped the letter through a slit, and went 
down the wooden steps into the street. On the 
other side he saw the bay team standing at the 
hitch rail in front of the store. 

He went over to them. He spoke to them, 
and their ears leaned toward him. He was rub¬ 
bing their noses when the driver backed out of 
the store, his arms piled high with bundles. The 
driver shouted some banter to the storekeeper, 
turned around and dumped the armful of pack¬ 
ages under the wagon seat. Placing his foot on 
the hub of the near wheel, he reached across and 
gathered up the lines. He was about to climb 
up when he noticed Dan looking at him. 

“Hullo, kid.” 


26 


RIDER IN THE SUN 


“Hullo,''’ said Dan. It was the first personal 
word he had spoken in days and the sound of 
his own voice startled him with its familiarity. 

“What’s your name?” asked the man. He 
was a tall man, a man of gaunt, thin angles. 

Dan told him and prepared to give further 
information, when abruptly, the bay team’s ears 
went forward. Their heads swung. One of 
them neighed piercingly. The riding man was 
bearing down upon them at a dead run, and the 
brim of his black hat swept back above his fore¬ 
head. He leaned easily in the saddle as he went 
by, waving his arm. 

Dan turned to the man beside him. “He 
didn’t even have hold of the reins!’’ 

“He don’t need to — on that horse.” 

“Do you know him?” 

“Sure, Laramie Jim.” 

“Laramie Jim. Oh, Laramie Jim.” 

The man climbed to the wagon seat. Dan 
took a step toward him, peered up into the sharp 
brown triangle of the man’s face. 

“Where are you going now?” 

“Home.” 

“Have you got a ranch around here?” 

“Sure.” 


27 


RIDER IN THE SUN 


“Do you need any one to work for you? I 
want to work. I haven’t got any money left. I 
can ride.” 

“How old are you?” 

“Fifteen — almost.” 

“Where do you live?” 

The boy moved his arm in a casual gesture. 
He thought that Laramie Jim might move his 
arm in the same manner. “Oh, around. I’m 
sort of a — sort of a— See?” 

“Sure. Climb up.” 

Dan climbed up and sat close to the man. He 
could see the wrinkles in the man’s face, the 
sweat marks on his shirt. “What’s your name?” 

“Hatt,” said the man. “Bill Hatt.” 

“Oh. Well — what’s your brand?” 

“Lazy H — horses left hip. Cattle left ribs.” 

“That means the H is lying down on its side.” 

“Yuh.” 

Dan nodded. “I know about those things.” 

Bill Hatt shook out the lines. The team 
pressed forward, and the wagon swung away from 
the hitch rail. Dan looked into the distance 
where a yellow butte gleamed. 

“Are we going there?” 

“Farther than that.” 


28 


RIDER IN THE SUN 


Beyond the fringe of town they came upon 
mud, and the brown backs of the horses stretched 
and writhed. 

“The mud’s pretty sticky, isn’t it?” 

“We call it gumbo.” 

The smell of used harness and damp wind grew 
strong in the boy’s nose. He sat stiff and 
straight. All his longings were on the brink of 
fulfillment. 


2 


Night came stealthily, like cold air crawling 
in a tunnel. The darkness made the wagon’s 
rumbling seem closer. They passed between 
two sandstone rimrocks near a stream, and the 
stream spoke among stones in a small careless 
way. In the darkness, with no sounds except 
from the stream and the wagon, Dan grew tense 
with a recollection of the man who rode with his 
reins hanging on the saddlehorn. Admiration 
swamped his heart. With rein-chains jingling 
and a blue roan under him, he felt that the con- 

29 


RIDER IN THE SUN 


quest of new worlds would be a simple thing. 
“Pretty soon they’ll be calling me ‘oldtimerl’ ” 

Bill Hatt whistled once and the wagon stopped. 
They were in a wide valley where the stream 
ran slowly and held reflections from stars. Every¬ 
thing was quiet except the wind which blew im¬ 
measurably. It was a hard arrogant wind with¬ 
out airiness or banter. 

Dan peered all about him in the gloom. When 
he looked at the stars he was nobody. He was 
two eyes wondering, but nothing more. Did 
other people lose themselves this way? His 
father and his mother? Probably they did. 
Probably they were looking at the same stars. 

“Let’s unhook.” Bill had climbed down from 
the wagon. A clank and rattle came from his 
fumbling at the doubletrees. 

“Oh, sure.” Dan crawled down over the 
wheel, finding the ground with his toes. He tried 
to see what Bill was doing, and to do the same 
on his side of the team. 

When the horses were unhitched, Bill opened 
a gate and the horses trotted through. Dan lis¬ 
tened to their trotting. When it ceased, he 
heard them splashing in the creek, heard them 
suck at the water. 


30 


RIDER IN THE SUN 


“Come along with me,” said Bill. 

Dan followed toward a low black lump against 
the sky. The lump became a cabin built of 
logs. As they came around a corner of the 
building, a light shone out at them. 

Bill opened the bunkhouse door, and the boy 
turned for one last gulp of the night. He saw 
a ragged line where the rimrock reached along 
the sky. He saw the pale proud stars, untroubled 
by the wind, or dreams or anything that he could 
guess. He smelled the black air, and heard in 
the distance the sound of a coyote which he had 
not heard before. 

Bill motioned to him and he stepped inside the 
bunkhouse, leaving behind the night and its sen¬ 
sation. In the lighted room he saw three men, 
and one was very old, with eyes so tired they 
must have looked upon a million tattered scenes. 

Bill moved his hand toward the old man. 
“That’s Soupbone Dodge. And over there in the 
bunk is Tommy Peters. And that’s Pat Rotay 
— him working on the bridle.” 

Dan gazed at them. He gazed behind them, 
and the room’s intolerant strangeness rose to 
astonish him. There were two bunks on each 
side of the room, built one above the other against 

31 


RIDER IN THE SUN 


the log walls. Everywhere were gear and ap¬ 
parel: an old saddle; two black rifles in a corner; 
a cartridge belt hanging from a peg in a bunk 
post; a pair of beautifully made riding boots. 
The boots had round tops, and bright stitching 
ran over them. An old rope hung from a peg in 
the wall under some weathered buffalo horns. 
And Pat Rotay sat working on a bridle — as 
though it were a natural thing to do! 

“Howdy,” said the old man. 

“Make yourse’f homelike,” said Tommy 
Peters. 

Pat Rotay laid his bridle aside. “Hullo.” 

They stared at him as if nothing ever sur¬ 
prised them. He thought they wanted him to 
say something. “Well, hello.” 

Bill Hatt grinned. “You better get to sleep. 
Morning comes early here.” 

“Pm not tired. I never seem to get tired.” 

As Bill went out, the wind groped through the 
door and made the lamp flare up. 

“You can have the top bunk any time you want 
to turn in,” said the old man called Soupbone. 

Dan looked up at the bunk. The assurance 
of the men sowed in him the seeds of doubt. He 
wanted to absorb their drawl and calm. But he 


32 


RIDER IN THE SUN 


could not help speaking louder than necessary. 

“The gumbo was pretty bad.” 

Old Soupbone blinked at him. A look of un¬ 
derstanding came and went quickly in his sunken 
eyes. “Ain’t you got no soogan?” 

“Soogan?” 

“Blankets.” 

“No.” 

“Well, you take a couple of mine.” 

“Won’t you be cold?” 

The old man shook his head and passed Dan 
the blankets. 

The men kicked off their boots and climbed out 
of their pants. Each crawled into his bunk, 
and Pat Rotay gave Dan a boost into the one 
above his own. Soupbone had blown out the 
lamp, and the room was dark. The men breathed 
audibly. The log walls creaked. 

Dan lay upon his back, his arms stretched tight 
along his sides. “It was pretty good of Bill to 
give me a job riding with this outfit.” 

Tommy grunted from the top bunk opposite. 
A job riding with this outfit, thought the boy. 

“Say, do you know a man named Laramie 
Jim?” 

Old Soupbone stirred uneasily. No one spoke. 

33 


RIDER IN THE SUN 


3 


Waking, he rested his head on his hand, and 
peered over the edge of his bunk. Below was 
the confusion of men dressing: Soupbone, put¬ 
ting on his spurs, was bent almost double, and 
the veins stood out in his forehead. His lips 
pulled far to one side to keep the cigarette smoke 
away from his eyes. Pat stood curling his bare 
toes from the floor. He was sticking matches 
into his hatband. Tommy Peters was buckling 
on a cartridge belt. 

Dan sat up shivering. Into him poured the 
realization that he had a job on a cattle ranch. 
The future brimmed with riding. Home was just 
a speck. It did not matter. He dangled his 
legs over the edge of the bunk, and rubbed his 
hands in his eyes. 

“Get a wiggle on,” said Soupbone, “if you’re 
hungry.” 

He jumped down, dressed quickly, and fol¬ 
lowed the men out of the bunkhouse into the early 
daylight. He looked about him at the low log 

34 


RIDER IN THE SUN 


buildings, the wind-ripped smoke streaming from 
the stovepipe of the cook shack, the sheds and 
corrals, the colors of land and sky. 

Breakfast was fried potatoes and salt pork 
and coffee. When the men finished they piled 
their dishes in neat stacks and walked out toward 
the pole corrals. Soupbone wiped and wiped 
at his white mustache. Bill Hatt stopped beside 
Dan. 

“Sleep good?” 

Pat Rotay was climbing the corral fence with 
a rope in his right hand. In the corral the half 
dozen horses began to circle as if they thought 
they could laugh at Pat Rotay. Transferring 
the coils of the rope to his left hand, Pat shook 
out a loop with his right. The horses whitened 
their eyes. Pat’s wrist turned over unexpectedly 
and the loop shot out and settled over a buck¬ 
skin’s neck. At the rope’s touch the horse 
stopped running and came in. In a twinkling, 
Pat bridled and saddled the horse and led it 
through the corral gate. Soupbone and Tommy 
each caught and saddled a horse, and Bill put 
the corral bars back in place. 

The riders mounted with curious elasticity. 
Horse, man and stirrup-leather appeared to 

35 


RIDER IN THE SUN 


stretch with the forward lunge. Tommy Peters 
rode easily for five long leaps, lying along his 
horse’s neck with only one foot in the stirrup. 
Soupbone’s horse reared and plunged and the old 
man’s face did not twitch or change. They got 
away and strung out across the valley in the di¬ 
rection of the creek, racing for a little distance. 
Water flew up as they forded. It was silver in 
the sun. 

Dan turned to Bill: “I better catch a horse and 
get going!” 

“There’s a stretch of fence to build.” 

“Fence?” 

“Yuh.” 

“Oh.” 

Bill stalked away toward a tool shed behind 
the corral. 

Dan ran after him. “Listen, Bill, I don’t 
know about fences.” 

Bill was rattling iron tools in the shed: a crow¬ 
bar, a shovel, a sack of staples, some wire-stretch¬ 
ers. He stood up and seeing Dan in the door¬ 
way of the shed, handed him a crowbar and a 
shovel. “Come on.” 

Dan followed up the yellow height beyond the 
bunkhouse. 


36 


RIDER IN THE SUN 


‘‘Listen, Bill ” 

He tried to keep up with the man striding 
silently ahead of him. Now and then Bill turned 
to ask a question, leaning to catch the answer 
above the wind. “Did you ever dig post holes 
in sandrock?” 

“No, I never dug much anywhere, but I’ve 
ridden quite a lot of horses.” 

Bill’s body lurched in the effort of steep climb¬ 
ing. Dan dropped behind, seeing nothing but 
Bill’s lean straight back. It was covered with a 
faded cotton shirt which showed dark where sus¬ 
penders had shaded it from the sun. It looked 
hard and real, like a rock upon which one rests 
a hand. 

“Can you milk cows?” 

“I milked one, one time.” 

He could look nowhere except at Bill’s back, 
which bent against the hill’s steepness. 

“When am I going to ride?” 

“Three riders is all I need.” 

They came to the top of the divide. The boy 
paused beside the hard brown man. He turned 
and looked back. He saw immense miles. He 
saw in the valley a twisting stream; he saw a yel¬ 
low rimrock far away, a sky without a cloud, a 

37 


RIDER IN THE SUN 


bunch of cattle with their noses to the grass in 
one direction. 

“Bill, look!” 

“Take your shovel and your bar, and every 
ten paces dig a hole in line with them other holes.” 

Dan picked up his shovel and began. He 
struck sandrock, and reached for the heavy bar. 
Thump . . . Thump . . . Thump . . . Earth 
and sky and awe departed from his mind, leaving 
only the voiceless ache of exertion. 

At noon they drank from a bottle of water and 
ate thick bread. Dan studied Bill’s face. It 
was strong. Sharp hard bones were near the 
surface, and over them the skin stretched taut. 
The eyes were gray and shadowed under straight 
black brows. A lump of bread swelled the man’s 
cheek. He chewed slowly, looking into the dis¬ 
tance. 

“What do you think about when you’re dig¬ 
ging?” the boy asked. 

Bill stopped chewing. “I don’t think about 
nothing. I see the fence — the finished fence.” 

“Oh. Well — I think about horses.” 

Bill folded the paper bag which had contained 
the bread. He placed it carefully in his hip 
pocket. “Let’s get to work.” 

38 


RIDER IN THE SUN 


Shadows reached half across the valley. The 
boy’s feet felt heavy and clumsy. He wanted to 
stumble against something. It would be a fine 
reason for falling in the grass and resting. 

“Let’s call it a day.” 

“All right — if you say so.” Dan’s face and 
mouth were slack from fatigue. His feet, carry¬ 
ing him down hill, hurt with exhaustion. His 
mouth trembled and he hoped for darkness. 

Far below, the three riders moved in across 
the valley. Smoke swept in a gray writhing river 
from the cook shack chimney. 



Around him in the other bunks slept Soup- 
bone and Pat and Tommy Peters. A shaft of 
pale light came through the window. He knew 
the light came from stars that would not let the 
night be dark. It touched the rifles in the cor¬ 
ner, the inlay in a bridle, and Soupbone’s scrawny 
hand which was outflung. 

The nearness of the men and their accoutre- 


39 


RIDER IN THE SUN 


ments moved his imagination. He figured for¬ 
midably in the pictures, but in the midst of deeds 
he saw Bill Hatt’s untirable back, the dusty 
knuckles of Bill’s hands. 

He lay back, resting his cheek against the 
blankets which smelled faintly of the old man. 

He turned his face downward. 


40 


Chapter Three 

1 


H E looked jubilantly at the long line of fence 
posts, for he had planted them himself 
with Bill; and the posts were many, straight and 
uniform, like efficient crosses on a battlefield. 

Bill Hatt laid down his tools. “We’re most 
done.” He was very near to seeing the finished 
fence. Then he would feel a brief pin-prick of 
achievement — and his mind would call something 
new into line for creation: a ford across Lame 
Horse creek, cleared land in the bottoms for 
alfalfa, new buildings. 

They started down the hill. Bill hummed as 
he strode, for he looked beyond the ranch that 
was and dwelt upon a ranch to be: great corrals, 
ten thousand head, a bunkhouse with thirty rid¬ 
ers. Bill thought of these good things and his 
eyes reflected the patience and the permanence of 
undiscouraged men. 

Behind him trudged Dan. The weeks of work 

41 


RIDER IN THE SUN 


had accustomed his stringy muscles to the weight 
of shovel and crowbar. The wind tangled his 
yellow hair. He thought of his father walking 
up the avenue toward home; his mother singing 
in the kitchen; himself near her, telling her some 
accurate things in regard to triangles. 

“Hungry?” 

“No.” 

“You done a day’s work. You’d ought to be 
hungry.” 

“When does mail come?” 

“It don’t. Some one brings it. Any one 
brings it when they go to town.” 

In the cook shack the riding men glanced up, 
and Soupbone waved his fork. “Apricots. 
Stewed.” 

“The gov’ment’s buying up a bunch of horses,” 
said Tommy. 

“I hear they’re getting good prices,” said Pat 
Rotay. 

Soupbone leaned back in his chair: “Shattuck 
was telling me he’s missing some horses. Some 
one else knows about them prices, I expect. A 
man makes good profit selling other folk’s 
horses.” The old man turned toward Bill. 
“Shattuck was by to-day.” 

42 


RIDER IN THE SUN 


Bill nodded and sat down with Dan. 

The cook’s face shone in the lamplight. He 
looked owlishly at the boy, then rolled his eyes 
toward a cigar box on a shelf where mail and old 
papers lay cluttered. The cook wore a grain- 
sack apron, and the cord tying it cut a groove in 
his stomach. He usually went barefooted, some¬ 
times pinching his toes between the warped floor 
boards. He served the food in a challenging way, 
and afterwards hovered over the pots on the stove 
like a fat sullen bird. 

He now inspected a kettle, and, as if reassured 
that all was well and that it would be safe for 
his attention to shift for a moment, reached into 
the cigar box and drew out a letter. Holding it 
close to the lamp, he read the address and squinted 
at Dan. “It’s for you. Shattuck brought it.” 

“Me?” 

The cook came across the room, stopping once 
to hiss when a splinter stuck into his foot. In 
one hand he held a ladle, in the other hand the 
letter. He passed the letter to Dan and went 
back to the stove where he began to speak dole¬ 
fully into steam rising from a kettle: “We’re low 
on coffee, Bill. You’d ought to get twenty pound 
at a lick.” 


43 


RIDER IN THE SUN 


Bill, who was eating apricots, stopped the spoon 
on its way to his mouth. “Spoils if it ain’t used 
quick. The good goes out of it.” 

Dan longed to slink away into a room with one 
small light. The writing on the envelope seemed 
to speak, like a voice of unforgettable loveliness. 
The writing was his father’s. His father was 
left-handed, and they had joked about his writ¬ 
ing, because it slanted the wrong way. 

The riding men pushed back their plates and 
filed out of the shack toward the bunkhouse. 
He was glad when they had gone. His lips 
curled in a trumped-up sneer. “I wonder who 
could be writing to me.” 

“Maybe it’s your folks.” 

Dan shook his head: “Oh, no. Not them.” 

Outside, the wind continued its siege, rattling 
the tin wash basin on its nail. 


Dear Son: 

Of course we won’t chase you. We want 
you to try and find whatever you are hunting. 
Mother and I understand what it is that made 
you run away. There have been times when 
we felt that way, too. You are hunting the 

44 


RIDER IN THE SUN 


answer to everything, and the question is never 
quite clear in the asker r s mind, nor the answer 
ever complete. 

Mother and I were worried, because we had 
not heard from you. We didn’t know where 
you were. You must never, never again keep 
us uncertain about you. We would willingly 
make any sacrifice if it means your life will be 
finer. But we must know where you are and 
what you are doing. 

We want you to come back, but more than 
anything we want you to find what you’re after. 
Tell us about your adventures. Tell us about 
the men you have met and the horses you are 
riding. 

If there is anything you need, write or tele¬ 
graph. Mother asks about clothes. Have 
you enough warm ones? 

Have you made your plans for coming 
home? 

Your father 


On a stool near the lamp the cook sat explor¬ 
ing a catalogue and whispering his discoveries 
aloud: “Blue denim over hauls. Order number 

45 


RIDER IN THE SUN 


D-six-two-nine-four. Two dollars and eighteen 
cents.” He turned a page with a vicious snap of 
his thumb. “Hell, everything is going up but 
wages.” 

Dan’s sharp elbows bore against the table, his 
chin cupped in his hands. The sound of Bill’s 
humming kept tearing his thoughts away from 
home and he wanted to hide, and think and think 
about home, to think so intensely that he would 
hear his father’s voice and see his mother’s face 
close by. 

He saw each detail of his bedroom. He heard 
soft rain on the attic roof. He saw his mother’s 
face, remembered it in all detail. He smelled 
the earth of his own yard, where probably his 
father and mother would be raking dead leaves 
away from the shrubs. He saw his father walk¬ 
ing up the street popping a newspaper against his 
leg. 

It was as if he were actually there. In his 
mind he laughed and joked with friends. They 
listened motionless to his tales. He would raise 
his hands and say to the listeners: “These hands 
have dug a thousand post holes-” 

Bill Hatt was humming, and the wind tor¬ 
mented the shack. The boy’s fingers dug against 

46 



RIDER IN THE SUN 


his cheeks. He was not home I He was two 
thousand miles away in a country without elm 
trees. There were no birches, no brooks with 
dark moss on their beds! He drew a breath, and 
the muscles of his throat were tight. 

“Better go and turn in,” said Bill. 

He looked at Bill steadily. What did Bill 
know of his thoughts ? What did Bill know about 
anything? 

He stood up and went to the stove. Lifting 
a lid he dropped the letter into the coals, turned 
and went out. 

Power and incentive had been washed from 
him. On the hard path between the cook shack 
and the bunkhouse he stood whimpering. The 
ridge and gable of the bunkhouse rose against 
the sky. The moon hung cold and oblivious. 
He had come here to ride a swift-running horse, 
to sing to the rhythm of furious hoofs, to listen 
to songs at night by a fire. Instead his hands 
had grown hard with clutching a crowbar and his 
shoulders drooped with its brutish weight. 

He groped for reasons to justify returning 
home. He had done wrong to his father and his 
mother. He could amend the wrong only by 
returning. No other way could he show them his 

47 


RIDER IN THE SUN 


love, or define his hate for Bill Hatt who hummed 
and thought of fences. 

The wind bore false witness to the beat of hope. 
The wind was unfair. In dreams it was sound¬ 
less. Here, it was like a dead regiment holler¬ 
ing in a cave. 

Toil, toil, toil. Bent back, hard hands and 
soil. He would go back! Until then he would 
sleep with his face toward the east, and he would 
reach and reach toward home. 

A far-away sound made him start. Hoof beats, 
caught in the wind, blew down upon him. He 
moved his head suddenly and expectantly, like 
a man hearing a step in an empty house. Tunka - 
tunk . Tunka-tunk. Tunka-tunk. A sound im¬ 
possible to hear without a quickening heart. Its 
echoes challenged and defeated sorrow. 

Closer and closer came the sound, like the 
rising pulse of drums. He could see the rider 
legendary in the moonlight. His head was tilted 
and, as he thundered by, Dan saw the shape of 
his face. He was singing to the beat of the hoofs, 
his easy swaying in the saddle, and his gestures 
and his motions in some strange way akin to the 
ring in his voice — daring, laughing, grand. For 
an instant the song was clear, the figure gigantic 

48 


RIDER IN THE SUN 


in its nearness, the hoofs a joyful cannonade. 
Then he was gone. 

The boy’s hands twitched in amazement, his 
face pale in the glowing night. All things he had 
wished for lived fleetingly within him. 

He ran to the bunkhouse and opened the door. 
Pat and Tommy and old Soupbone were inspect¬ 
ing items of riding gear. He saw them only as an 
audience for his unburdening. “Soupbone! 
Laramie Jim went by I” 

Soupbone stuck his thumb through the ear loop 
in a bridle he was soaping, and glanced warningly 
at his two friends. He pushed his mustache 
away from his lips. “Quite a sight, ain’t it?” 

“Where was he going?” 

Pat Rotay laughed. “I figure he was comiw' 
from some place.” 

“Laramie, he most gen’ly rides that way,” said 
Soupbone. “Likely he’s goin’ to string along 
with the roundup. It’s working down the val¬ 
ley.” 

Tommy and Pat nodded at their knees. 

“The roundup? Does it come through here?” 

“It’ll work right down the valley. We’ll 
string along, when it gets in our territory.” 

“I’ll string along, too!” 

49 


RIDER IN THE SUN 


Soupbone pressed the lid onto the box of 
harness soap. “You better mention it to Bill.” 

Dan climbed to his bunk. After a time the 
others turned in and Soupbone blew out the lamp. 
Moonlight streamed through the window. The 
night was still, hovering. 

“Soupbone, has Laramie ever shot a man?” 


50 


Chapter Four 


1 

T HE wind carried the sound of calves bawl¬ 
ing, and the smell of burning hair. The 
riding men that morning talked nervously. They 
talked of saddles and bed rolls; or riders they had 
known. They talked about “old days.” 

Dan thought that if he did not go with them 
on roundup he would never have any old days to 
talk about. He sensed dimly that old days were 
as wonderful as days to come. 

After breakfast Soupbone said: “They’ve 
reached Lame Horse flat, Bill. I expect we bet¬ 
ter be movin’ along.” 

“Sure.” 

Soupbone nodded and went out. 

Dan stopped eating and went to stand in the 
cook shack door. He heard Soupbone call to 
Tommy and Pat. They went into the bunkhouse 
together and after a moment came out, each with 
a bed roll tied in a slicker. 

51 


RIDER IN THE SUN 


They saddled, tying their rolls behind the cantle 
with thongs. They laughed among themselves 
as they rode up the valley, and Soupbone turned 
and looked back. 

Dan stared after them. Roundup for the rid¬ 
ing men! Roping, riding, cutting out, slipping 
down into draws in search of Lazy H cows with 
their unbranded calves. 

While he, treated as if he were a baby, called 
“kid” or “son” or “young feller,” stayed to dig 
post holes, to milk frowzy cows that switched 
their tails in his face, to grub sagebrush on the 
bottom land beside Bill Hatt. He had shown 
Bill that he could work as hard as a man. Bill 
ought to give him a man’s job. 

He went into the cook shack, stopping beside 
Bill. 

“Hey, listen, Bill.” 

Bill pushed back his plate and picked up his 
coffee cup in both hands. He rested his elbows 
on the table, and holding the cup close to his lips 
blew gently. “Listen to what?” 

“Why don’t you give me a man’s job? I’m 
big enough. I can ride.” 

“What’s the matter? Ain’t you satisfied?” 

Dan’s cheeks flushed. “Yes, only I thought 

52 


RIDER IN THE SUN 


what with my being big enough and strong enough 
you’d let me go on roundup with the bunch.” 

Bill looked out over the bottom land beyond 
the cook shack window. He and Dan had begun 
to clear the sagebrush, and their two adzes leaned 
side by side against a cottonwood stump. “Go 
’way, kid. Go 'way away. You got a fever.” 

“Won’t you let me go, Bill?” 

“Nope. Need you ’round here. Some one’s 
got to do chores.” 

Dan licked his lips. “Do I have to do them 
all my life?” 

“For now, anyways.” 

His shoulders moved forward. He tipped his 
head slightly back. “Well, Bill — I reckon I’ll 
take my time.” Laramie would have said it like 
that. 

Bill stopped sipping his coffee. “All right, I’ll 
bring your money over to the bunkhouse d’rectly.” 

In the bunkhouse he began to gather his things. 
After a while Bill came in and sat quietly on Soup- 
bone’s bunk. 

“Here’s your time. Forty-three dollars, I 
make it.” 

Dan took the money quickly and put it in his 
pocket. Paid in full. Henceforth his job, his 

53 


RIDER IN THE SUN 


food and shelter were unknowns. He was too 
young not to laugh at burned bridges, but a slow 
doubt troubled him. 

“I want to go on roundup, Bill. There’s 
horses, and — everything.” 

“Sure, I know all about it. You go to A1 
Christie. He’s boss. You tell A1 I sent you. 
Maybe he’ll give you a job helping the wrangler, 
if it’s horses you want. There’s an old saddle 
in the shed. You can take it.” 

“Take a saddle? Me?” 

“Go ahead an’ take it.” 

“Bill — after I’m gone you’ll be grubbing sage¬ 
brush all alone.” 

“Sure.” 

“Don’t you ever get tired?” / 

“Sometimes I do — but I think of how it’ll 
look with alfalfa growing.” 

“And then what?” 

“I think of new buildings. More land. More 
cattle. There’s always something. It makes 
work easy if you look ahead and see it done.” 

“I look ahead, too. I see the roundup, and 
Laramie and horses.” 

“Well — you’ll like the roundup.” 

Dan said good-bye, and trudged off up the val- 

54 


RIDER IN THE SUN 


ley. The heavy saddle rested on his shoulder, 
and as he looked ahead he thought of Bill stand¬ 
ing in the doorway — motionless, steadfast, 
leathery. 


2 


Laramie had no home. He didn’t need one or 
think of one or ask for one. 

Dan was in the thick of it now. Swift milling 
horses lived in his days and haunted his dreams. 
He loved them hungrily, the molten fluid shape 
of them, the feel and smell of them, the clamor of 
their hoofs, their wind-tossed manes. He was 
one of the bunch, the greatest bunch that ever 
lived: Soupbone Dodge, A1 Christie, and Laramie 
Jim who had shot a man! 

With part of his forty-three dollars he had 
bought some straight-shanked spurs from Pat 
Rotay, and from Tommy an old pair of riding 
boots with tworcolored stitching and round tops. 
The heels were made as boot heels should be 
made, for Jem Roney said so and Jem Roney was 
a deputy sheriff. 


55 


RIDER IN THE SUN 


The rattle of dumb hoofs marching; swish of 
a short loop, thump of a body falling; smoke of 
fires, and the sound of young calves bawling. 
By day a far-flung horizon with sharp white 
peaks against the blue. By night the purple 
dark laden with the scent of dry grass and of 
horses near. There were lonely voices in the 
night which the presence of the bunch seemed to 
make more understandable — a coyote yapping 
on a high divide, a dove mourning in a cotton¬ 
wood, and the solemn wind like some great person 
breathing. You couldn’t tell but what it might 
be God, for once in a while He seemed necessary 
and nearby. 


3 


Laramie Jim rode into the bed ground on a 
jaded horse. He came straight toward Dan who 
stood outside the rope corral watching the ani¬ 
mals inside. Dan felt shaky, because he saw that 
Laramie was going to speak to him and he had not 
spoken before. 


56 


RIDER IN THE SUN 


“How’s my roan?” Laramie put his hand on 
the rope fence beside the boy’s. 

“He’s the best horse in the bunch. I like him, 
because — ” He stopped in the middle of his 
sentence. Daylight seemed to make no change 
in Laramie Jim. His black hat was spotless. 
He walked as if his feet did not quite touch the 
ground. He walked the way the blue roan ran. 
He grinned at Dan, showing the white edges of 
his teeth. “Want to ride him once?” 

“Your horse?” 

“Sure.” 

“Well — I wouldn’t mind.” 

Laramie whistled, and the roan’s ears jerked. 
“You take my hull off this plug, and I’ll saddle 
a real horse for you to ride.” 

In a moment the roan was ready. He kept 
picking up his hoofs and dropping them nerv¬ 
ously. Laramie laughed. He drew the reins 
together above the horse’s neck. “Here you go.” 

The stirrups were inches too long, but Dan 
didn’t mind. The horse lunged forward under 
him. He rode with his knees, and he watched 
the wind-torn mane. The horse seemed scarcely 
to move under him, so smooth was the gait. 
Objects of landscape slid along, blurred. 

57 


RIDER IN THE SUN 


He rode a mile into the sunset, and on the re¬ 
turn he overtook Soupbone and A1 Christie, who 
were moving toward the chuck wagon near the 
bed ground. He raced by close to them, twisting 
around in the saddle. He felt scornful of them 
on their chunky graceless mounts. He waved 
both hands to show that the horse ran free. They 
watched him go. 


4 


That night Dan lay in the darkness just beyond 
the firelight. There he could watch Laramie, 
and hear his low drawling legends of men who 
had died in feuds and had not cared. The bronze 
light flickered on listening faces. The canvas 
of the chuck wagon flapped in the wind like an 
uncertain phantom. Laramie began to sing, and 
the sound of his voice filled the boy with high de¬ 
fiance of wind, of darkness and of home. 

Laramie was midway of the song when deputy 
Jem Roney and three others came searching for 
a man named Long Bob. They rode straight into 

58 


RIDER IN THE SUN 


the firelight, and no one spoke. No one moved, 
but carelessness and comfort vanished from each 
man’s mood. Dan recognized Jem Roney by his 
white hair, but the twinkle had gone from his 
eyes. 

The light of the flames danced on bit and 
buckle. The horses stood silently, except for 
the creak of leather when they breathed. 

Jem Roney reined his horse around so that 
without turning his head he could look at Laramie 
Jim. “We’re lookin’ for Long Bob.” 

“Well, Jem, he ain’t here.” 

“No, I can see he ain’t. I was wondering if 
you could tell me anything about him.” 

“Why, no, I reckon I couldn’t Jem — anything 
at all.” 

“Well, all right, Laramie. It’s too bad.” 

“Yeh, it’s a damn shame.” Laramie stood up 
slowly. His legs were braced wide apart, his 
thumbs hooked in his belt. He tipped his head 
back a little so that he seemed to be looking down 
at every one. Dan lay quiet, holding his breath. 
His lips parted as he marvelled at each detail 
of Laramie’s bearing. He wondered if he might 
some day bring himself to look at men the way 
Laramie looked — hard, and high and straight. 

59 


RIDER IN THE SUN 


Jem Roney and his men rode away. At the 
night fire no one talked, or looked at Laramie 
Jim. The men lay or squatted on their heels and 
listened to the sound of hoof beats dying out in 
the dark. The bunch sang no more that night, 
but watched the embers for a time and one by 
one went to their blankets. 



In the morning Laramie was gone. 

Dan looked everywhere for him. He looked 
again and again at the horses in the rope corral. 
The big blue roan was not there. 

He went to Soupbone who was saddling a 
homely cutting horse. “Soupbone, who’s Long 
Bob?” 

“Why, I expect he’s the one been taking Shat- 
tuck’s horses.” 

“Oh.” Dan frowned. “Just a horse thief. 
Where do you think Laramie Jim has gone?” 

Soupbone’s eyes looked tired. He smoothed 
his saddle blanket over and over again. “You 

60 


RIDER IN THE SUN 


go over to my warbag and get my other spur 
straps, will you?” 

“Where has he gone?” 

Soupbone reached under for the front cinch. 
“Where? Oh, just moved on, I expect. Feller 
like him changes his range every now an’ then. 
Kind of itchy restless feet.” 

“He’s a wonderful rider.” 

“Laramie? Sure, he can ride.” 

“Will he come back?” 

“You can’t never tell.” 


6 


Big blue days rolled by as the roundup moved 
down the valley. Circle riders combed draw and 
coulee and sparse forest of lodgepole pine. But 
Laramie did not return, and the bunch said noth¬ 
ing definite about him. They spoke vaguely, as 
if he were an old memory. 

Finally, without warning, the roundup reached 
the end of its territory. The ranges in its wake 
were combed clean. The roundup was done. 

61 


RIDER IN THE SUN 


The riders disbanded, and each man rode his way 
with a “so-long” and a wave to his friends. 

Soupbone stood over his warbag which was 
nearly packed and ready for the return journey. 
He looked down strangely at the boy, and guessed 
the magnificence of his dreams. “What you 
troubling about?” 

“I was wondering where Laramie had gone.” 

“There’s no telling, kid. But I got a notion 
he rode south. Why?” 

“Nothing. Only — I won’t go back and work 
for Bill.” 

“Why not?” 

“He only thinks about fences and grubbing 
sagebrush.” 

“Them things are important.” 

“My feet feel itchy.” 

“I expect,” the old man said. He stooped, his 
hands fumbling in the depths of his pack. He 
brought out an old hat and a split-ear bridle with 
rosettes on the cheek-pieces. “Here.” 

Dan took them and inspected them over and 
again. He turned gratefully. “Thanks. Pretty 
good leather in that old bridle.” 

“Yuh.” 

“Well — I guess I’ll be going now.” 

62 


RIDER IN THE SUN 


Soupbone’s eyes were like an ancient hound’s. 
“So-long kid.” 

“So-long.” 


7 


On a nine-dollar horse Dan rode along the val¬ 
ley of a slow river. If the distances he rode were 
small in miles, they were monstrous in his mind. 
He was on a quest. He felt important in his own 
right, for about him were no aged men to outdo 
him or remind him of the fewness of his years. 
He rode singing in grave imitation of the man he 
thought he might find. The ways of the land 
and of horses were friendly and familiar, and he 
felt unlike a boy. 

He owned his own outfit. He had tied a can 
of tomatoes behind his cantle, after the manner 
of range riders. His horse took on magnificence 
in his eyes. He loved the shape and arch of its 
neck, and the drowsiness of its stare. “My 
horse! My saddle! My own damn spurs!” 

Whenever he met a stranger he would draw 
rein and push the old hat far back on his head 

63 


RIDER IN THE SUN 


and ask: “Have you seen my friend Laramie 
Jim riding along this way?” 

No one had seen Laramie; but once in a town 
he asked his question of a man standing near the 
blacksmith’s shop. The man laughed and Dan 
felt young and trifling because of a note in the 
man’s laughter. “What the hell you want with 
a horse thief?” 

“My Laramie Jim’s a rider. He rides a big 
blue roan. There must be two of them, mister.” 

“Must be.” The man walked away, his shoul¬ 
ders shaking. 

Late one evening Dan rode into a tiny town. 
Its scattered loading pens by the railroad tracks 
and its few insecure buildings appeared to sleep. 
To the right and left of him on the wide street 
were lighted windows. On the left was a restau¬ 
rant. On the right was a saloon. From both, 
pale streams of light ran downward, spreading on 
the street. 

Tied to the hitchrack outside the saloon were 
several horses. Sometimes they moved a little 
and looked like living shadows. 

As he rode close, one of the horses stepped into 
a puddle of light. Dan stopped, crying out joy¬ 
ously in his surprise. Then he saw that the dim 

64 


RIDER IN THE SUN 


light had tricked him. The horse was a giant 
roan almost like Laramie’s, but it was a mare 
and the brand was different. 

It would have been wonderful to find Laramie, 
to walk up to him and say, as if he didn’t much 
care: “Why, hullo there, Laramie. How’s 
tricks?” Then they might sit down together on 
some wooden steps somewhere and talk about 
the bunch — Soupbone, Tommy and the rest. 
They might make plans together. “Laramie,” 
he would say, “shall we string along together? 
You and I? We could get a job riding for some 
big southern outfit, the two of us.” And Laramie 
would say, “Why, sure,” and then probably he 
would sing, or maybe fumble with the blue roan’s 
bridle reins. 

Dan tied his horse close to the mare at the 
hitchrack and, brushing the dust from his over¬ 
alls, walked stiff-legged across the street to the 
restaurant. 

He had reached the middle of the street when 
a sound made him turn. He saw a man coming 
from the door of the saloon. As the door opened 
a fat plume of light thrust itself into the street. 
He caught a glimpse of the saloon’s interior. Its 
noises suddenly increased in volume. He heard 

65 


RIDER IN THE SUN 


laughter and the scrape of boots. Three or four 
indistinct faces turned curiously toward the de¬ 
parting man. The door swung to. 

The man walked unsteadily to the hitchrack 
and untied the roan mare by jerking the bridle 
reins. Dan watched, worshipping the horse, ad¬ 
miring the man because he possessed such a horse. 

Neglecting to tighten the cinches, the man 
mounted. The saddle slipped and the mare 
reared straight up on her hind legs. Dan saw 
her in partial silhouette against the lighted 
windows. She was so beautiful that he grew 
tense with love for her. She came down hard 
on her front feet and kicked her heels high. 
The man slid off over her head and sat in the 
street. Still holding the bridle reins, he jerked 
himself to his feet and reached for the loaded 
quirt which was looped over his saddle horn. 

He led the mare into the light from the win¬ 
dows. Holding her head down by twisting the 
cheek piece of the bridle, he struck and struck 
with the butt of the quirt until the white blaze 
on her muzzle turned dark. Then, tightening 
the cinches, he mounted and rode away. 

Dan swayed forward, shaking with horror. 
His throat felt twisted and dry and his ears 

66 


RIDER IN THE SUN 


rang. All things he had thought beautiful glared 
in ugliness. He felt sick. All the rightness 
had gone from life. He did not know what 
to do. 

Scarcely aware of what was in his mind, he 
untied his horse and followed. His mind and 
senses hammered him. A man had half killed 
a horse. He would follow that man and that 
horse. 


8 


It seemed only a short time later that he found 
the roan mare, riderless. She grazed by a creek 
which looked dark and somber because of the 
white mist gathering on its surface. Probably, 
he thought, the man had fallen off the horse 
because he was so drunk. The man no longer 
counted. 

He dismounted and unsaddled the roan mare. 
He flung saddle, bridle and blanket into a clump 
of brush. He rubbed the silken back from 
withers to rump, went to the creek, moistened his 
handkerchief and sponged the sore muzzle. 

67 


RIDER IN THE SUN 


He was in the midst of a deed decided by him¬ 
self, taking part in deadly matters. He kept 
speaking to the roan mare, sometimes mumbling, 
sometimes whispering, sometimes beseeching, 
never realizing what he said. “I’m a horse thief 
now. I don’t care. The wetness must feel nice 
on your nose. I’m a horse thief. That’s quite 
a thing and they’ll come after me and get me.” 

He glared into the darkness, growled at what¬ 
ever phantoms might be drifting there to hurt 
her. Tenderly he slipped the bit into her sore 
mouth. Carefully he smoothed the blanket be¬ 
fore he cinched on his saddle. With a slap on 
the rump, he turned his own horse free, mounted 
the roan and rode away. 


9 


Gray arms rose out of the east, and the breath 
of morning blew from the hills. The sun sent 
out tall red vanguards which stalked among the 
cottonwood leaves, the gray sagebrush, the wet 
stones in the creek, everything. In the boy’s 

68 


RIDER IN THE SUN 


heart the strength wavered and receded with the 
rising of the sun. 

He began to look back. He had stolen only 
one horse, yet, merely because of that, they would 
be coming to get him. Unsmiling men would ride 
upon him from all directions. 

He decided to leave the wagon track and 
venture across open country into places which 
would engulf his memory and his deed. Turning 
to the left he rode up a long narrow valley. On 
one side was a divide with a scarred patch here 
and there where the pines could find no mooring 
for their roots. On the other side, the left, a 
long sandstone rimrock ran for a mile. Above 
the rimrock rose the brown hills, billowing back 
and beyond. 

Dan’s shoulders sagged. He leaned forward, 
resting his forearms on the saddle’s swell. The 
sun warmed his back. He felt its penetrating 
drowsiness. It seemed nearly a year since he 
had rested. The muscles in his face gave up, 
and exhaustion roamed in the shadows back of 
his eyes. 

Wouldn’t it be safe to rest just a little? The 
roan mare was nearly done. She had had a hard 
time too. 


69 


RIDER IN THE SUN 


He thought then of the can of tomatoes tied 
in his slicker behind the cantle. 

He rode to the bank of the creek which wound 
through the valley. “There,” he said to her. 
“Ten swallows, ole girl, that’s all for now.” He 
drew tight on the reins and she threw her head up 
and snorted. “All right, eat some blue joint if 
you want to.” 

He let her munch for a while before turning 
into a thick clump of pines part way up the right 
side of the divide. Above him in the branches 
the wind sang like remote violins. Across the 
valley through an opening he could see the hills 
rising beyond the rimrock — a long brown line 
against the sky. The land was peaceful and 
warm. It was contented, as if no humans had 
marched across it. 

He unsaddled the mare and let her out on 
his picket rope to graze. He opened the tomatoes 
with a knife and ate them savagely. Everything 
was all right now. He was an outlaw, safe in 
retreat. He lay on his back with old Soupbone’s 
hat covering his eyes. The sun sank deep into 
his muscles. He took a long breath and in a 
moment was asleep. 


70 


RIDER IN THE SUN 



Through the air and from the ground, pound¬ 
ing into his ears came the sound he loved and 
dreaded. Tunka-tunkf Tunka-tunk! Tunka- 
tunk! He swept the hat from his eyes and sprang 
to his feet. Hoof beats! Why had he rested 
here? They were coming to get him! 

He looked back. A horseman bending low in 
the saddle rode furiously up the valley. Less than 
half a mile away, he rode straight toward the 
boy, swung abruptly into the pines on the hillside 
and vanished. 

Dan ran to the picket rope, caught his foot 
on a protruding pine root, stumbled, fell. He 
fell with his wrist doubled under him and he 
lay for a moment staring curiously down at it. 
It did not hurt. It felt numb and dead, refusing 
his commands in a puzzling way. He scrambled 
to his feet. With his left hand he coiled his rope 
and strapped it to his saddle. No longer could 
he hear the wild rattling of the hoof beats. Still¬ 
ness frightened him even more than sound. 

71 


RIDER IN THE SUN 


Maybe the rider was sneaking toward him, 
hidden among the pines. Maybe he had a rifle. 
He wished his wrist would do something besides 
flop when he tried to move it. It was beginning 
to swell and the pain ran up his arm. 

He glanced through a rift in the pines toward 
the rimrock across the valley. Once the rimrock 
had been placid and unpeopled. But now five 
horsemen moved against the sky, like shadows 
on a wall. He tried frantically to bridle the 
mare with one hand. But he could not keep his 
eyes from the men on the rimrock. They were 
searching the valley up and down. He saw one 
of them point and he thought the black arm 
reached covetously in his direction. 

He beseeched the roan mare. “Put your 
head down. Put your head down. I can’t reach. 

I can’t-” She held high. Her ears leaned 

forward and her head swung toward the thickest 
of the trees behind him. Dan dropped the bridle 
and stared, eyes wide open and appalled. Just 
a few feet away from him, a low branch moved 
and a man stepped into view. 

“Aw — say I Laramie Jim!” 

Laramie stood smiling just a little, exactly as 
he had stood the last time Dan had seen him, legs 

72 



RIDER IN THE SUN 


braced wide apart, hat slanting, thumbs hooked 
in his belt and a grinning coolness in his bearing. 
Dan straightened and flung out his arms. 
“Laramie 1” 

“Hullo, cowboy.” Laramie looked at the roan 
mare and gave a queer ironic shrug of his 
shoulders. “Where’d you get her?” 

“Why — I stole her.” 

Laramie glanced at the riders who were thread¬ 
ing their way single file along the rimrock. 

“But I’m not a horse thief, Laramie. Honest 
I’m not. I mean, not a regular horse thief.” 
He went close to Laramie, looking up at him 
intently. He told Laramie what he had done. 
He spoke eagerly with small intense gestures. 
And when he had finished, he paused and said, 
“And now they’re coming to get me.” 

“Well,” said Laramie. “They won’t.” 

“Why?” His hands shook. “Laramie, were 
you with them? Were you coming after me?” 

Laramie searched the hillside with sharp 
scrutiny. The riders were zigzagging swiftly 
down toward the flat. “Well — yes. But I got 
out ahead. My horse has got speed.” 

In two long strides Laramie reached the mare. 
He slipped on the bridle and saddled her with 

73 


RIDER IN THE SUN 


quick unwasteful dexterity. Dan watched each 
detail of the work. He was so confident and 
nerveless! He jerked the latigo down through 
the cinch ring and dropped the stirrup into place. 
“There you are,” he said. “Now lemme see 
that wrist.” 

The boy held out his arm. “You think I’m a 
horse thief?” 

“I expect the law says you are. Got a hand¬ 
kerchief?” 

He took Dan’s handkerchief and bound the 
sprained wrist. 

“What will they do?” 

“Why nothing, nothing at all. Put your 
thumb on that knot. They’re getting down the 
rimrock.” 

“Why won’t they?” 

Laramie’s mouth wrinkled curiously. “Be¬ 
cause the roan mare belonged to Long Bob and 
they caught him afoot this morning, so Bob won’t 
need her no more now.” 

“They got Long Bob! Then why don’t I just 
let them catch me? Then I could tell them 
about it, Laramie.” 

Laramie hesitated, eyes turning toward the 
rimrock. Two of the riders had reached the 

74 


RIDER IN THE SUN 


valley. “They might not look at it that way. 
You see when — when we got Bob afoot back 
there, why, he told how you had took his horse 
and they’re coming to find out.” 

“How did he know I took his horse?” 

Laramie’s hands twitched. The two foremost 
riders were in plain sight. “Don’t say any more 
now! Get a wiggle on as fast an’ far away 
from here as you can. Quick!” 

Dan grasped the bridle reins and thrust his left 
foot into the stirrup. The color had faded out 
of Laramie’s face. 

“Laramie — what’s the matter?” 

“Get away — quick!” 

“I’m not scared, not with you. I’m not afraid 
of anything any more.” Dan looked at him 
hungrily. The nearness of Laramie, the pain 
in his wrist, the thumping of his heart stirred him 
so that his words knew no restraint. He swung 
his right leg over the cantle. “I’ll see you again, 
won’t I? I hate to go away like this. Why, 
Laramie, you’re the Rider!” 

The last man had made his way down the rim- 
rock and was coming at a run. Dan settled him¬ 
self in the saddle and leaned forward, searching 
Laramie’s eyes. “I asked a man in a town if he’d 


75 


RIDER IN THE SUN 


seen you. And he said, ‘What do you want with 
that horse thief?’ And I said, ‘There must be 
two Laramie Jims, mister.’ Wasn’t he a fool?” 

Laramie looked away at the riders. He 
laughed, and his voice was like dry sand sliding 
off a shovel. “He was a fool. They’re fording 
the creek now.” 

“So-long, Laramie.” 

Laramie reached up and grasped Dan’s injured 
hand. The pain made the boy’s face old and 
sick, and sweat popped out on his forehead. But 
it didn’t matter. Laramie was helping him make 
a getaway. Laramie was grinning up at him, 
saying: “So-long, old-timer!” 

Dan touched the roan mare with his spurs and 
she wheeled up the hillside, taking the ground in 
live, hungry leaps. He felt the wind tearing at 
him. He felt the strength of a fine horse under 
him. Again and again he heard Laramie Jim’s 
last words: “So-long, old-timer!” 


76 


Chapter Five 

i 

H UNGER and sinking sun and faith in 
humans prompted Dan to open a barbed 
wire gate and enter the land of a homesteader 
before twilight. 

The homesteader’s name was Snell, and his 
thoughts were of wheat. Snell stood in the door¬ 
way of his sod-roofed shack. He was lanky, and 
his clothes hung in loose folds about him. He 
watched the boy’s horse trot toward him. As 
Dan approached, a spray of grasshoppers leaped 
before him nearly to the height of the mare’s 
shoulders. The grasshoppers mainly interested 
Snell. He looked at them hopelessly, for he 
knew they had come to despoil his wheat for the 
third lean year. 

Snell’s wife and two children came to the door 
and grouped themselves about the spindling bul¬ 
wark of Snell. 

“Howdy,” said Snell. 

77 


RIDER IN THE SUN 


“Hullo.” Dan looked scornfully upon them. 
He was an example of a successful and dramatic 
escape. He knew things they could not even 
suspect. His face had a smug expression, like 
a gossip, ostentatious with secrets. 

They stared at him. The stare was not of 
suspicion, but of hunger for news, a new voice, a 
new encouragement. 

Dan had so long been alone with his feeling of 
being a fugitive that he began now to talk and 
laugh in a turbulent unbalanced manner. “I used 
to live in the east, a long time ago. But I live 
out here now. I’m really a westerner. I just 
came off the big roundup a few days ago. I was 
with Soupbone Dodge and A1 Christie and 
Laramie Jim. I know Jem Roney. He’s a 
deputy sheriff. He’s my friend. I worked over 
a month for Bill Hatt and three weeks for A1 
Christie.” The words gushed incoherently. 

“Light down and rest you.” 

“You’ll take supper with us,” said the woman. 
Her hands fumbled. Her dress hung like a dis¬ 
heartened thing, and her bare feet pressed flatly 
against the dirt floor of the shack. 

“I’m hungry,” said Dan. 

“We ain’t got much, but you’re welcome,” 

78 


RIDER IN THE SUN 


said the woman. Unconsciously, almost as if by 
magnetism, her hand reached out and touched the 
head of one of her children, a child of two. The 
hand rested there until the child reached up and 
drew it down. 

Dan put the roan mare in Snell’s corral and 
returned to the shack. He sat down and ate with 
them at the board table. Potatoes and beef. 

On a bench in a corner of the cabin sat a very 
old woman with thin gray hair and spectacles. 
She peered at Dan with eyes so aged they showed 
no changes, lights, or interests. 

“That’s my mother,” said Snell. 

The old lady swept some sewing from her 
lap, stood up by slow degrees and walked crook¬ 
edly to the stove where she moved a black iron 
kettle over the fire. “You’ll want tea,” she said 
without looking at them. “You’ll want tea.” 
She repeated it raspingly to assure herself that 
she had said it. 

“Bill Hatt sent us this beef,” said Snell. 

“Bill Hatt? Did you say Bill Hatt?” 

Snell nodded. “His place ain’t far.” 

Recently he had thought of Bill Hatt as being 
tremendously remote. 

After the meal Snell stood in the door of his 

79 


RIDER IN THE SUN 


cabin. Sometimes a hovering bird dipped down 
and a small cloud of grasshoppers arose, scattered 
and receded. The wheat was doomed. 

Dan stayed near Snell’s wife, following her 
about in the shack from table to stove, stove to 
table. She was silent, working like one who has 
stopped thinking about monotony and struck a 
steady stride maintainable till death. She was 
the first woman Dan had laid eyes on in two 
months. This was the first family of father, 
mother, children and grandmother he had seen. 
He was moved to confide in them, to tell them 
deeply buried things. He heard himself talking 
to Snell’s wife of his mother and father. She was 
serenely interested, asking questions in a voice 
which had no inflection: 

“Do you miss your mother?” 

“Miss her? No.” 

“Doesn’t she know where you are?” 

“She did know.” 

“Do you think about her?” 

“Sometimes, when I — ” 

“I reckon you miss her.” The woman’s face 
was expressionless. It was like her voice and 
her work and her life, as if it too had found a 
painless and enduring mold. She stared with 

80 


RIDER IN THE SUN 


pallid curiosity at Dan’s bound wrist. “Hurt 
your hand a little?” 

He moved his wrist nervously. He regarded 
it as a memorial to things unreal. “It’s nothing,” 
he said, “Nothing at all.” 

Details of home marched through his mind. 
He wanted Mrs. Snell to know of them. “We’ve 
got a fireplace with tiles around it. Blue tiles. 
There’s a couch in front of it. My mother sews 
there at night.” 

“What does your father do?” 

“He reads.” 

The woman nodded. 

“Once a week we have beans cooked in a stone 
pot,” said Dan. 

“With molasses?” 

“My father and I take walks on Sundays in 
the woods. Back of our house there’s a path 
running into the woods.” 

“Do you have brown bread with the beans?” 

“Yes, raisins in it. They sink to the bottom. 
You only get them in one end. I used to get that 
end. We burn leaves on the lawn in spring and 
fall. Every one does on our street.” 

The woman worked with her dishes. “You 
better stay with us to-night.” 

81 


t 


RIDER IN THE SUN 


The family retired a short time after night¬ 
fall. The grandmother slept in one bunk with 
the two children. They tussled and pushed at 
her with their hands, but she did not move or 
respond to their play. She was limp, like an 
old sack worried by puppies. 

Before getting into the bed with her husband, 
Snell’s wife came quietly to Dan. She was 
carrying a greasy lamp. She had come from 
looking at her two children lying with their grand¬ 
mother. She had touched their blankets as if to 
assure herself that all was well with them. With 
the same uncalculated gesture she smoothed Dan’s 
blankets and looked in at him. There was a 
hollow gasping breath as she blew out the lamp, 
then immense stillness and the stench of coal oil. 

It was almost like being at home in his own 
bed. He felt the same security and peace until 
bits of earth began to drop from between the 
rafter poles. They fell to the floor with a sound 
like raindrops in a forest. 

The smell of burning pitch awoke him. The 
grandmother stood by the stove, rattling a black 
skillet. Snell’s wife came to him and touched 
his shoulder gently. “My, but you slep’ sound.” 

“You sure did,” said Snell. He sat hunched 

82 


RIDER IN THE SUN 


on a bench like an outlandishly patient crane. 

Dan pulled on his boots and washed in a basin. 
They sat down to breakfast. He helped the 
children to fried salt pork, dipping their bread 
in grease for them, laughing aloud when they 
spoke of it as gravy. He wanted to stay a long 
time to play with the children and to talk with 
Snell’s wife. 

“You never heard a sound all night, did you?” 
she said to him. 

“I guess there weren’t many sounds to hear. 
I would of waked up — just like a wolf.” 

“Jem Roney and some men stopped by about 
twelve o’clock.” 

“They had Laramie Jim,” said Snell. 

The food in Dan’s mouth turned dry. He 
could not swallow. He looked at Snell’s wife. 
He looked at Snell. They did not seem to be 
accusing him. His eyes were puzzled and be¬ 
seeching. “Why did they come?” 

Snell’s wife ate for a moment, then said: “They 
had Laramie Jim and Long Bob.” 

“Laramie Jim?” 

“Yes,” said Snell. “Him an’ Long Bob been 
stealing Shattuck’s horses a long time.” 

“What do you mean?” Dan started up from 

83 


RIDER IN THE SUN 


the bench. “He never stole any one’s horses.” 

Snell’s wife reached out both arms and gathered 
plates, sliding the knives and forks from them and 
piling them in a greasy tower. “Roney took that 
big mare along with him. They found your 
horse. They left him for you. He’s out there 
in the corral.” 

Dan’s mouth sagged. He started jerkily 
toward the cabin door. 

“Ain’t you goin’ to finish your food?” the 
grandmother screeched after him. The old 
woman’s fingers sneaked out and, seizing his plate, 
dragged it to her. She began to eat like an 
animal, her eyes half glazed with famine. 

Dan went to the door and looked out. His 
nine-dollar horse stood in the corral drowsing 
on three legs, lower lip rising and falling. His 
fingers picked at the front of his shirt. “Laramie 
Jim didn’t steal Shattuck’s horses.” 

Snell’s wife came to the doorway. 

Snell said: “Everyone knows he’s a horse 
thief.” He spoke in a detached way. He was 
staring through a window across his wheat fields 
where the grasshoppers fed relentlessly. “It’s 
a dry year.” He seemed to forget everything: 
poverty, frustration, the squalor around him, the 

84 


RIDER IN THE SUN 


heat, the barrenness of his life, even his own 
presence amid elements which had defeated him. 
He smiled, and his sunken eyes, looking inward, 
beheld a vision of grain bending in a wind which 
promised rain. His vision gave tenacity to life, 
gave happiness, gave a pulse to the passage of 
time. It was deathless in him. 

Dan crossed the threshold of the cabin. 

“Where you going?” 

He ran toward the corral. They watched 
him saddle and ride away. Snell’s wife raised a 
red hand in a listless wave. Her face was blank. 
She glided back into the cabin and Snell took her 
place in the doorway where the rays of a white 
sun slanted. He looked out like a lord over his 
wheat, dreaming, while his wife began to work. 
The grandmother, having finished her feast, re¬ 
tired to a dark corner, and sat. In her lap her 
hands flopped over and back. 


2 


Dan rode swiftly, seeking in the clatter of his 
horse’s hoofs to escape the wreck of certainties 

85 


RIDER IN THE SUN 


which had been fond. But there was no escaping 
the inrush of reality that threatened to engulf 
him. 

The mystery surrounding Laramie was not mag¬ 
nificent, but mocking. The men had been reticent 
because they did not want him to know what they 
knew. Most poignant, most bewildering, was the 
realization of what Laramie had tried to do. And 
when this accumulation reached him in its full¬ 
ness, all cords which held him came apart. His 
spurs, his boots, his belt and bridle sickened him. 
Accoutrements of dreams! Fake medals on the 
breast of a ghost! 

Dismounting on a hill, he lay face downward, 
clutching the grass with his fingers. His heart 
grew round and furious with hurting. All might 
have been a dream except for the pain in his in¬ 
jured wrist, and the handkerchief binding it, and 
the knot that Laramie had tied. 

His shoulders rocked, and the words rushing 
between his immature lips were incoherent and 
believed. 

“I love my father and my mother, and I hate 
everything and every one here. God, I guess I 
am not big any more.” 


86 


RIDER IN THE SUN 


3 


From the top of the hill he looked into a valley. 
Beyond, the sun touched mountain ranges with 
a beauty too full to recur, drawing all hardness 
from the fringes of the world. He felt solemn 
and selfless, as if he were alone in a church. 

Only a good world could contain such views. 
Only a good world could harbor such beings as his 
father and mother, Mrs. Snell, Bill Hatt and 
Soupbone. He thought devoutly of their good¬ 
ness, and pondered the meanings of their lives. 
His father’s and his mother’s hopes were centered 
upon making him more complete than they them¬ 
selves had been. Dim or blazing, this hope was 
constantly alive in them giving them motive and 
purpose. The homesteader’s thoughts were of 
wheat in wondrous fertility. As long as he could 
see that picture, poverty was justified, hunger 
quenchable, toil purposeful, life good. 

The color drifted to the rim of the sky, and 
distant objects grew vague. He came to a fence, 
below which spread the purple valley. He gave 

87 


RIDER IN THE SUN 


an astonished outcry as he recognized the valley 
and the fence. It was a stout substantial fence 
with four taut strands of wire; a remarkable and 
righteous fence; a familiar and lovable fence. 

Below was the bunkhouse, the cook shack with 
the pale smoke straightening from its chimney. 
He felt the swelling elation of one who has gained 
the first plateau in an ascent. Safety! Known 
things! Harborage! He opened the barbed 
wire gate, and on his nine-dollar horse rode down 
the hillside. 

The sage rattled against his stirrups as he 
crossed the flat. From the dusk a tall man 
emerged, his shoulders slightly stooped, a re¬ 
membered solidness in his outline. 

“Bill! Bill! Hey, Bill!” 

Bill Hatt leaned his adz against a sage bush. 
“Hullo, kid.” 

Dan glanced at the cleared area closing around 
him in the dark. “You’ve done an awful lot, 
haven’t you?” 

“Just begun.” 

“Can I help you some more? I’ll work hard, 
harder than before.” 

“Sure.” Bill patted the horse’s neck. “You 
ride a nice horse there.” 


88 


RIDER IN THE SUN 


“One I picked up for nine dollars.” 

“Nine dollars? Let’s go eat.” 

He twitched the reins and the horse stepped 
ahead. Bill strode alongside, his hand in the 
horse’s mane. 

“Look, Bill, we’ll get this whole flat cleared, 
just the two of us working together.” 

Beside the horse Bill’s brown boots shuffled 
with a patient sound. “There’s a letter waiting 
for you.” 


4 


My own dear son: 

I am writing this letter without knowing 
whether it will reach you. It has been so long 
since your one first note, and I am anxious to 
know everything about you. Please write to 
me, son. 

Father’s understanding of your motive in 
running away is very fine, and you would love 
him more than ever if you could hear him speak 
of his faith in you. We have talked again and 

89 


RIDER IN THE SUN 


again about it; but I cannot lose the hurt of 
your going. 

I am dreadfully anxious to see you, and to 
hear about your adventures, and I am lonely 
for you, dear. 

Mother 

P.S. I am sending you a bundle of clothes . 


After a few days, when his wrist had healed, 
Dan wrote in answer to his mother’s letter: 


Dear Mother: 

It seems as if I had been gone from home 
a year. Your letter made it seem like more 
than a year. 

I went on roundup with a man named 
Laramie Jim. He was a wonderful man and 
the finest rider I ever saw. But he was a horse 
thief. So I came back to Bill Hatt’s ranch and 
Fm working beginning to-morrow, grubbing 
sagebrush with an adz. Have you ever seen 
an adz? Bill Hatt’s ranch is where I first got 
a job digging post holes. I am going to work 
until I have enough money to come home. The 

90 


RIDER IN THE SUN 


cattle shipments start in fall and I will come as 
far as the stockyards on a cattle train and on 
the fastest train from there. 

There is an old man in the hunkhouse named 
Soupbone Dodge. He doesn’t say very much, 
but I think he likes me. He gives me things. 

I don’t ride very much. I have got some 
riding boots and spurs and Soupbone gave me 
a hat and bridle. He seems to think a lot of 
me. I had one ride on Laramie Jim’s horse 
which was the finest horse I ever saw. 

I will be very strong from working when I 
get home. 

Love, 

Dan 


91 


Chapter Six 

1 


S OMETIMES, in the midst of toil, he lost 
his hold on the picture of home, fastening 
with provident greed upon the job at hand. In 
the confines of exertion, life grew very narrow, 
its horizons sometimes as close as the separate 
blows of his adz. His world became so con¬ 
tracted that it was like looking across the top of 
an accordion, each peak of each fold being a goal. 
Each blow with his adz brought gratification in 
the anticipated completion of the next, and he 
lived in the contemplation of these compressed 
triumphs. It made small difference toward what 
he saw ahead — sunset, supper, the passing of a 
cloud. As long as the point deserved a hope, no 
moment of the present was unendurable. Some¬ 
times he swung the adz until in his weariness and 
hunger, food and shelter and rest became his 
dearest dreams. He worked close to the earth, 
where these three are inveterate essentials, where 

92 


RIDER IN THE SUN 


dreams of bread and beef and bed are as gratify¬ 
ing as the concept of heroism, or gold. 

Bill Hatt worked near by, the dried sweat seam¬ 
ing his face and chalking the creases of his clothes 
with salt. 

Frequently Dan longed to write home for 
money, to leave this work forever behind him. 
But sterner longings intervened. He divined 
that a finished job was a kind of nourishment with¬ 
out which no human could subsist. 

His feet stumbled to the cook shack door, to the 
bunkhouse, to the flat. The things he missed 
were play and laughter. Days so much alike 
that to remember one was to remember all, ex¬ 
cept for one outstanding sound — the note of a 
single cricket lamenting Fall’s approach. 



One morning Soupbone tarried at breakfast, 
clearing his throat for the passage of important 
words. 

“I was talking to A1 Christie on the Lame 
Horse yesterday. He said he got word that 

93 


RIDER IN THE SUN 


threes and fours was bringing around fourteen.” 

Bill shoved back his plate: “We can make up 
a trainload between us. You go up an’ look 
over that bunch to the west. They ought to be 
in good shape.” 

“They’re all right. I can tell you now they’re 
all right.” 

Dan’s mouth hung slightly open, as if to assist 
the inward rushing of joy. Was it possible that 
from this moment he could count the days? He 
could not believe it. His tight pattern of exist¬ 
ence would not loosen without leaving wounds. 
Yet the end was near! It was actually so, be¬ 
cause Soupbone and Bill hinted honestly at it. 

“You said I could go on the cattle train, Bill!” 

“I’ll send you an’ Soupbone.” 

“When?” 

“Maybe a week.” 

His voice rose in a giddy laugh. “A week!” 



' All that day alone on the flat he worked like 
Hercules, revelling in the stretch of muscles as he 
heaved his adz at the sage. Clump after clump 

94 


RIDER IN THE SUN 


fell before him. He removed his shirt so that he 
might feel the wind cooling his arms and give 
them all possible freedom. He worked in a fiery 
exultation, a kind of clarion happiness. 

No more could he see fault in Bill Hatt. He 
even loved Bill, seeing despite his reticence and 
his humming an eminently solid man. It was so 
good to be alive and in a world filled with good, 
quiet men. 

Early in the afternoon Bill rode toward him 
from the shack. It was the first time he had 
seen Bill ride. He was astonished that he rode 
so well. 

“Bill, see how much I’ve done!” 

“Quite a jag,” said Bill. 

“Tell me about the cattle.” 

“We’ll ship.” Bill hesitated a moment. “I 
got a little extra job for you: Can you find your 
way over to Snell’s?” 

“Easy!” 

“There’s a meal bag of fresh beef in the shed. 
You take it over your saddle and leave it to Snell’s 
for them to eat. An’ on the way back go into the 
north pasture an’ bring down them eight horses 
for the boys to ride gathering stock. Can you 
do it?” 


95 


RIDER IN THE SUN 


Dan flung the adz far away from him. “Didn’t 
I help the wrangler on roundup?” 

“Here — take my Steve horse. You got four 
hours till dark.” 

Bill dismounted, and Dan caught up the bridle 
reins. Steve shied away from him, eyes white. 
“Easy. He ain’t been rode all summer.” 

“I can ride him.” 


4 


He sallied forth through the big gate. He 
sat straight in the saddle and his head was high. 
The springs that leaped in Steve’s body were 
under the power of his bridle hand. Soupbone’s 
decrepit hat slanted over his eyes and the bit 
chains jingled in private merriment. 

This was a real job. Bill Hatt had given him 
sole trust of a bag of beef and eight horses. And 
in a week the wheels of a cattle train would be 
rolling him homeward. He could count the days 
to his mother’s voice, to his father’s detailed 
questionings: “Just what did Laramie say?” 

96 


RIDER IN THE SUN 


“Just how did you feel when you first saw him?” 
“How long did you work each day?” “Exactly 
what did Bill Hatt look like?” “How long was 
the fence?” 

He searched for landmarks, one hand holding 
the reins, the other steadying the beef which 
rested across the swell fork and held him nicely 
in the saddle. He smiled loftily, as he spotted 
a yellow hill sprinkled with a few dark pines. 
Beyond the hill was Snell’s homestead. Bill 
thought he couldn’t find it! He puffed at Bill 
for his lack of comprehension. 

A few minutes later he arrived at the parched 
homestead. Poor old Snell. It was his own 
fault. Any one should know this was a cattle 
country and not a wheat country. Snell was a 
fool. 

Everywhere around the cabin and the dooryard 
waved untidy grasses. Steve’s hoofs clip-clopped 
commandingly, but no children came to the door 
to stare. 

A feeling of uncertainty traveled coldly within 
him. Everything slid from his mind except the 
view of the cabin. The wind played boisterously 
with the door. The dirt of the dooryard was 
flat and without footprints, the corral bars down, 

97 


RIDER IN THE SUN 


the horses gone. A plow with rusty share and 
gray weather-cracked handles leaned against a 
shed wall. The dwarfed wheat rustled, “lean, 
rent and beggared in the strumpet wind.” 

“Hello there, Mr. Snell!” 

Dan pondered the sound of his own voice for 
a moment, and called loudly and disparagingly. 
“Hey, Snell! Where are you?” There was no 
answer. He was puzzled, thinly frightened. 

“Snell!” 

Steve shook himself, ruffling him from head to 
heel and setting up a rattle of gear. He began 
to prance at this delay and shouting for no sane 
reason. He arched his neck and turned squarely 
around. Dan’s eyes swelled wide, and his face 
dropped open in horror. A wooden cross leaned 
at the head of a long grave where coyotes had dug. 

The horizontal bar of the cross had been 
fastened with a nail, and single-minded animals 
rubbing against it had swung it downward at one 
end so that it looked foolish and contained no 
aftermath of meaning. A name was scrawled on 
the cross arm. Dan dared not go close enough 
to read it. It was better not to know, even 
though he wondered whether the ground covered 
Snell, or Snell’s wife, or the old, old lady. 

98 


RIDER IN THE SUN 


A squawk from the swaying door made him 
blanch. Snell and his family had gone, leaving 
souvenirs of death. Why had he not heard of 
this before ? It was a brutal country where neigh¬ 
bors died without your knowing; where you came 
abruptly upon the grave of a friend. He straight¬ 
ened in his saddle, determined that this happen¬ 
ing would not affect him. In a week he was going 
home on a cattle train and nothing could diminish 
that. 


5 


At dusk he opened the barbed-wire gate into 
the north pasture. A few high clouds gathered, 
moving regally across the night. One or two 
arctic stars blinked down at him. A tune sprang 
to his lips, a tune of frail defiance. Bill had 
said eight horses in the north pasture. He could 
not conquer a doubt about the horses really being 
there. Why, why did Bill call it a pasture? 
Eight square miles of guttered hills. 

Steve began to shy and dance and snuffle. Once, 

99 


) 


RIDER IN THE SUN 


when he wheeled and started for home, Dan 
nearly lost the beef which had grown companion¬ 
able against his middle. Where were those 
horses, anyway? Why couldn’t Soupbone and 
Pat and Tommy ride their regular horses? This 
was a fool’s mission, hunting for horses which 
no one really ought to have. 

He yanked the bridle with both hands. Steve 
reared and then quieted. Perhaps if he listened 
he might hear the horses, but he heard nothing 
except the wind’s rumor of old ice and solitude. 

He saw now that home was a long way from 
him. He saw a thousand dangers, a thousand 
accidents gleaming along the miles. He was no 
match for them. He thought of the grave in 
Snell’s dooryard and he knew that one quick 
happening could tumble him wantonly into hell. 

Steve broke into a run, and at the bottom of a 
declivity swerved sharply. The beef careened 
off into space, frightening the horse when it 
thumped upon the grass. He lost his right 
stirrup, and felt deserted and insecure, bobbing 
up and down like a fat woman. Steve ran wild. 

He fought the reins, angered at himself, bitter 
toward the horse which defied him. Bill and 
Soupbone would sneer at him for this, calling him 

100 


RIDER IN THE SUN 


coward. They would wink at each other and con¬ 
gratulate him with sniffs. 

His head howled with speed, and tears streaked 
backward on his cheeks. Soupbone’s old hat was 
snatched from his head, and the chin cord tugged 
at his throat. His left leg brushed against some¬ 
thing, and he covered his eyes in desperation. 
Then Steve’s hoofs rang on hard-packed ground, 
and at the sound Dan knew that he had come 
back through the gate and that Steve was racing 
for home. 

He had failed. He had not found the horses. 
He was not a good rider. He was a stupid stock- 
man, and worthless in a multitude of ways. His 
finish on a great ranch was inglorious. It would 
prick him forever with hints of cowardice. 

A stubborn flood of resistance rose in him. His 
lips drew tight across his teeth. He gripped 
with his knees, dragging on the reins with all 
his strength. Steve fought him briefly, and came 
to a plunging stop. “There!” The wind 
gathered up the word and shot it away. 
“There!” he shrieked. 

Back he turned, handling Steve with the firm¬ 
ness of a victor. He had ridden but a few 
minutes, when he discerned some blots moving 

101 


RIDER IN THE SUN 


and stopping in the darkness. Horses! He 
could hear their snorting breaths, their amiable 
nickering. While he had been searching, they 
must have strayed out through the gate. They 
must be bound toward the corrals, decoyed by 
dreams of grain. 

He circled stealthily behind them, his eyes en¬ 
larged as he counted: One, two, three, four, five, 
six, seven, eight! All safe in a bunch. He was 
now a fine horseman! He was a lone wrangler 
on a great range. The night grew docile and 
easy to deride. He rode behind the horses, 
slouching carelessly in the saddle. He sang, hold¬ 
ing his young voice low in his throat, after the 
manner of men who sang at night to cattle in the 
old days. 

He brought his small herd safely to the home 
corral and turned them in along with Steve. He 
remained for a moment outside the corral, taunt¬ 
ing his captives through the bars. 

He was disappointed that the cook shack was 
dark and still. He marched toward the bunk- 
house, dragging his heels so that his spurs clinked. 
No one had cared enough to wait up for him. To 
them his valor was nothing. 

His pace slackened as he drew near the bunk- 

102 


RIDER IN THE SUN 


house door. A shadow moved against the wall, 
and a voice said: “I was fixing to come after you.” 

“Hi, Soupbone! I found ’em all right.” 

He went quickly to Soupbone and stood near 
him out of the wind. The old man felt warm. 
He smelled of dead cigarettes, and horse. 

“I brought ’em back. Bill thought I couldn’t.” 

Soupbone pushed himself away from the wall. 
“Find Snell’s place all right?” 

“Oh — yes. I was going to tell about that. 
He’s gone. There wasn’t any one around. But 
there was a grave. It must be Snell or some one 
of his family.” 

“Gone?” 

“Yes.” 

Soupbone was quiet a long moment. Finally 
he said: “He had a hard time.” 

“I guess he had an awful hard time.” 

“Did you put the beef back in the shed? It 
ought to be hung up.” 

He had forgotten the beef. “It fell off up in 
the pasture. I couldn’t help it. Steve got to 
pitching and it fell off.” 

“Where did it fall?” 

“Where?” Dan tried to tell him, and after 
he had described impossible landmarks, Soupbone 

103 


RIDER IN THE SUN 


said: “You go in an’ go to sleep. I’ll find the 
beef.” 

“How can you find it in the dark.” 

“I’ll find it.” 

He felt an immense disturbing gratitude toward 
Soupbone. He was puzzled and reverent. He 
went silently into the bunkhouse, undressed and 
got into his bunk. In a moment he heard the 
hoof beats of Soupbone’s horse. He thought it 
improbable and outrageous that an old man could 
ride out at night into a ghostly land and search 
optimistically for a bag of beef. 


104 


Chapter Seven 

1 


B EFORE daylight Soupbone tugged at his 
shoulder. Dan sprang up, shouting in his 
eagerness. They ate a hurried breakfast, saddled 
and rode slowly to the herd which had been 
gathering for days on the flat. Approaching its 
fringes they whistled and called exaggerated 
calls. They drew the ends of their ropes and 
thwacked them against their chaps. The cattle 
were goaded into motion. Dust and the smell 
of steers hung in the air behind them, tumbling 
when the wind advanced. The sun rose, and 
Dan looked joyfully in its direction. This was 
all gallant and exciting, all charged with the 
shuffle of hoofs. 

It was the longest day he had ever spent at 
work. The riding men prodded horses, cattle 
and themselves over the last few miles to town; 
and when finally the herd stood bunched and 
moaning at the gate of the loading pens beside 

105 


RIDER IN THE SUN 


the railroad, the dust cloud above it glowed gold 
in the light of afternoon. 

The beeves crowded through the gate into the 
pens, urged by yells, by swift plunging spurts of 
mounted and relentless men. Soupbone and Bill 
closed the gate on the last tired critter. They sat 
their wet horses, watching the stock cars crawl 
along the siding and stop at the mouths of the 
loading chutes. 

Dan was riding his own horse. He looked on 
absorbed while the cars were shunted into posi¬ 
tion. Each car was to be part of the train that 
would carry him a great leg of the distance home. 
He beamed upon them, appraising their heavy 
wheels, their red sides, the white lettering upon 
them. He found them good. 

Dismounting, he tied his horse and went across 
the tracks into the railroad station. He had 
thought of writing a letter to his mother. He 
would send it ahead on a fast train. She and 
his father would know in advance of his coming. 
They would prepare for him, and he would have 
the joy of knowing that they expected him. 

Behind a grating in the station a sour-looking 
man stared from under a green visor. Dan asked 
for paper and pencil and an envelope. The man 

106 


RIDER IN THE SUN 

gave them wordlessly. He was interested solely 
in the brass telegraph key beside him. When he 
turned his head away from it, he appeared to 
lurch an ear in its direction. 


Dear Mother and Father: 

The cattle train is getting ready to leave. 
All I can hear is the bawling and bawling of 
cattle. It will take eight days to the stock- 
yards and then a day more home. We drove 
the herd eighteen miles to-day. But I am not 
tired. I do not seem to get tired any more, 
because I think of coming home. Bill Hatt 
and Soupbone say that I have done good work, 
and I know I am as hard as nails. Wait till 
you see the muscles in my arms and you will 
think so too. I will tell you everything when 
I get home. I cannot wait to see you and 
tell you. It seems as if I had been waiting 
forever. 

Love, 

Dan 

P.S. I think I could do good work at school 
now . 

107 


RIDER IN THE SUN 

“Can I mail this letter here?” 

The station master, whose cheek was fat with 
tobacco juice, said “Sure,” carefully. 

“I’m going with Bill Hatt’s cattle, Soupbone 
and me. Will the letter get there first?” 

The man spat aimlessly. “Christ, yes.” 

“Are you sure it’s all right to mail the letter 
here?” 

The station master scowled at the address. 
The telegraph instrument at his elbow began to 
click. He read its message as if it had been 
spoken directly by a voice. “Number Four is in 
the block. You come out on the platform and 
watch her pick up your letter on the fly. You’ll 
think it’ll get there all right.” 

A small distance to the right across the tracks 
Bill and Soupbone talked together, their horses’ 
heads close and confiding. They were waiting for 
a car to come into position at the loading chute. 
Tommy Peters and Pat Rotay had dismounted. 
They lay on the grass, smoking. 

A faint sound came from the rails at Dan’s 
feet. The rails began to hum portents, and to 
click impatiently, but he could see no train. 

The station master came out carrying the mail 
sack. He hung it on an iron arm extending from 

108 


RIDER IN THE SUN 


a post close beside the tracks. Then he went 
into the station and pulled a black lever. Dan 
heard a harsh sound and glanced around to see 
an order-board moving. Then, far off to the 
west, he saw the train. 

The station master, too, was looking at the 
train, proudly regarding its approach, as if think¬ 
ing: “That’s mine. I work for That!” Twice 
a day, each day of his life, the station master saw 
the spectacle of the eastbound and the west¬ 
bound: Number Four and Number Six. They 
held him to his job. Thoughts of their journey- 
ings and approach bridged boredom, made time 
race. He lived for them, because of them. 
They were the milestones of his life. 

The engine loomed black and intolerably near, 
and for the first time Dan saw that a racing 
locomotive joggled and swayed on the rails, and 
that the rails cringed beneath its weight. He 
caught an instantaneous flash of the fireman’s 
face, as the engine towered above him. From 
the corner of his eyes he saw the mail sack swing¬ 
ing from its hook. He heard nothing above the 
thunder of the train, but he was aware that the 
station master had cried: “Watch!” An iron 
arm reaching from the baggage car door plucked 

109 


RIDER IN THE SUN 

the mail sack from its hook and snatched it in¬ 
side the car. 

Then a lesser motion brought his glance to the 
side of the baggage car. This motion which at¬ 
tracted him was foreign to any motions he had 
thought of in connection with trains. A man 
swung in mid air from the hand rail at the head 
end of the baggage car. He was preparing to 
jump from the train, and Dan saw that he would 
be killed instantly and cried out to him not to 
jump — all in the merest trifle of time. The 
station master stood in a scared posture, his jaws 
tight shut. 

The rear cars of the train pounded beside 
them, but Dan did not heed them. The man 
jumped. His hat leaped from his head and dis¬ 
appeared. The man sailed for many moments, 
and finally struck the ground, curled into a round 
ball. A spot of dust flew up. Some leaves 
popped out of a clump of brush. The man rolled 
and rolled, and at last was still. 

Dan and the station master had forgotten the 
train. Far away the afternoon light gleamed on 
the brass railing of the last car. 

The station master ran toward the fallen man, 
Dan following. The man was nearly two hun- 

110 


RIDER IN THE SUN 


dred yards from them, and before they reached 
him he rose nonchalantly to his feet and began 
to brush dust and smudges from his clothes. 
Hearing their boots crunching the cinders, the 
man looked up into their faces as if to con¬ 
gratulate them in their running. They stopped 
near him, dumb with surprise. 

“Seen anything of a hat?” the man said. 
Casually he spied about him, until his eyes 
focused on a point near Dan. “There it is. 
You stepped right on it.” 

Dan started as if something had squirmed 
under his feet. He saw the hat and stooped to 
pick it up. It had no band, and there were torn 
places in the crown. He walked to the man and 
presented him with the hat. 

“Thanks.” The man’s smile sparkled like sun 
on moving water. 

The station master simmered. He spoke in¬ 
dignantly to the man. “Fool! You ought to be 
pulled in for a trick like that.” In his anger, he 
started toward the man but when he got properly 
close he stopped in his tracks and a woeful ex¬ 
pression came into his eyes. “Hell. It’s you, 
Laska I I ought to known it. What’s the idea, 
jumping? Ain’t you goin’ through?” 

Ill 


RIDER IN THE SUN 


Laska laughed. “They’d have nailed me at 
the next tank. I was on the blind.” He cracked 
his hat against his thigh and watched the dust 
explode from it. “I thought for a second you 
wasn’t going to remember me, Pete,” he said to 
the station master. 

Traces of anger remained like fumes in Pete. 
He was offended that this man should regard his 
beloved Number Four so airily. “You’ll get 
killed some day, Laska. Serve you right. By 
Jesus, it would.” 

“Killed? Me?” Laska made a deprecating 
grimace. “That jump was a cinch. You’d ought 
to seen me going west for the harvest. I jumped 
in a wheat field and I thought to God I’d never 
stop rolling. I threshed about an acre of wheat 
and tore out a mile of barbed wire before I come 
to a stop.” 

“I’d ought to have you pulled, dam’ if I hadn’t. 
You’re a menace. That’s what you are. A men¬ 
ace. I’ll lose my job account of you some day.” 

Laska put on his hat. He tugged at the brim, 
so that it slanted over his forehead and partially 
hid the lights in his black restless eyes. He 
looked along the tracks to the loading pens. 
“Stock train pulling out to-night?” 

112 


RIDER IN THE SUN 


“You keep off it, see?” 

Laska regarded him derisively. 

“Think I’d ride a rattler like that?” he said, 
and walked toward the pens. 

Dan followed Pete back toward the station. 
Pete kept frowning and grumbling in Laska’s 
direction. Between imprecations he discharged 
scraps of Laska’s history which Dan devoured 
with growing wonder. 

“Every year he rides through to the harvests. 
Then he rides back east an’ works in tunnels 
underground. When col’ weather comes, he 
goes south. He can board a train going forty 
an’ never stretch a gut. Some time he’ll miss. 
You’ll see. Sometimes he’ll — hell! He never 
paid a short-bit for railroad fare in his life. 
They call him Alamo Laska.” 

Some distance ahead of them Laska quickened 
his stride. He walked with spring and con¬ 
fidence, looking all around with laughing eyes. 
Pausing beside Bill Hatt, he patted Bill’s horse, 
and began to talk and gesture as if he had known 
Bill many years. Bill himself began unexpectedly 
to smile and he had never seen Laska, nor Laska 
him. 


113 


RIDER IN THE SUN 


2 


It was strange to hear Bill laugh. Generally 
he merely smiled. Even Soupbone who stood 
near grinned at something they had said. Laska 
climbed to the top of the loading pen fence and 
sat down, hooking his heels in a space between 
two boards. Bill turned across the tracks and 
into the station. 

A stock car rolled into place at the loading 
chute. Dan mounted his horse, and he and 
Soupbone rode into the loading pen among the 
cattle. “Hi-yah! Hi-yah!” they cried, dashing 
against their flanks. Dumbly and doubtfully the 
cattle filed up the chute and through the door of 
the car. Pat Rotay stood by the chute, shouting 
tally from time to time. A long chain of loaded 
cars rumbled along the siding. 

Frequently Dan turned in his saddle to look at 
Laska. It was growing dark and Laska had be¬ 
come a tall shape on the fence. Twice Dan saw 
him light a cigarette, and the match glowed bronze 
in his face. 


114 


RIDER IN THE SUN 


Bill’s form showed in the lighted doorway of 
the station. Shortly he appeared moving toward 
them along the tracks. Soupbone and Dan 
closed the gate of the loading pen, and waited. 
A turbulent excitement flowed in the boy’s veins. 

“Tie your horse to the corral,” said Bill. 

He dismounted and did as directed, and Bill 
handed him a paper. “Here’s your pass. Don’t 
lose it.” 

Dan took the pass and tried to discern its 
color. He put it carefully in his pocket and 
sometimes reached for it, gloating in its touch 
and meaning. 

Resting against the fence below Laska, Bill 
spoke in a low chuckling voice. “Here you are, 
Laska. Made out in the name of Henry East. 
All according to Hoyle.” 

Laska took his faked pass. “Thanks. Pete 
would give birth to a butte if he knew.” 

“He sure would.” 

Laska climbed down from the fence. “I better 
board her up the line a ways.” 

Dan walked over and stood beside Laska. 
“Coming with us?” 

“Sure.” 

Bill and Soupbone had begun business. “Same 

115 


RIDER IN THE SUN 


commission company as last fall,” said Bill. 
“Watch the feed and water — you know what to 
do.” 

“Sure,” said the old man. “They’ll get there 
in good shape.” 

“Hold the weight on ’em all you can.” 

“They won’t suffer none.” 

“Keep your eye on the kid, too, will you?” 

“I won’t let no harm come to him.” 

Dan felt qualms of resentment against Bill 
and Soupbone. They persisted in the belief that 
he needed protecting, whereas he knew, and sud¬ 
denly he wanted Laska to know, that he needed 
no tutoring except from his own experience. But 
Laska, having vanished far up the right of way, 
could not have heard. 

In augmenting thunder the clash of couplings 
ran the length of the train. Soupbone and Bill 
ran toward Dan. “She’s starting!” 

“So-long, kid,” said Bill. “Watch Soupbone. 
He’ll show you what to do. Just keep the cattle 
on their feet.” 

“I know what to do.” Dan grasped Bill’s 
hand. It was the first time he had ever touched 
Bill’s hand, but he had seen it so many times that 
the look of it was graven upon his mind. The 

116 


RIDER IN THE SUN 


hand was hard, strong, rough as splintered wood. 

“Good-bye, Bill.” A wave of gratitude welled 
in him. He wanted Bill to know how he admired 
him and was indebted to him. He wanted to 
tell Bill many things, but there was no time. 
“Take care of my horse, Bill. Sometimes give 
him a graining.” 

“I’ll look after him.” 

Dan and Soupbone climbed to the roof of a 
car, and felt its motion through their feet and in 
the coolness of their faces. Laska had not yet 
got aboard, but the train was moving. A de¬ 
liberate brakeman walked below them, his lantern 
throwing a mobile circle on the cinders. 

The boy’s breath came fast. In the gloom 
he saw Bill mount and start away from the tracks, 
leading two horses. He marvelled at the dark 
shape of him moving calmly into the chasm of 
night. Eighteen miles alone with two led-horses. 

The wheels rumbled in imperceptible cres¬ 
cendo. A steer bawled singly in the night, its 
note tragic with ignorance. 

They started back over the roof-walk toward 
the caboose. “You want to be careful jumping 
between the cars,” said Soupbone. “Stick near 


117 


RIDER IN THE SUN 


In response the boy jumped recklessly, walking 
faster, so that the old man labored after him 
thinking hard of his responsibility for the train¬ 
load of cattle and for Dan. 

The shouting of the engine died slowly as the 
rumble of the wheels gathered volume. Dan 
smelled coal smoke. Once, looking around he 
saw uproarious color rising from the open fire¬ 
box door. “You suppose Laska’ll make it all 
right?” 

“Sure.” 

i 

They reached the caboose and climbed over 
the eaves to the rear platform. Standing between 
the two red lanterns, they listened to the clucking 
of the wheels. Inside the caboose the voices of 
the other cattlemen were subdued. Vaguely they 
sensed that a poker game had begun. They 
watched the short span of rails flowing from 
beneath the caboose platform, vanishing into the 
gulf behind. 

Dan was washed in hard-earned weariness, 
but he knew he could not give up to drowsiness 
and contentment until Laska was aboard. He 
scarcely heard Soupbone’s voice: “When I was a 
kid I wanted to travel, too. Always wanted to 
see the ocean. I remember once, when — ” 

118 


RIDER IN THE SUN 


“We must be going thirty-five miles an hour 
now.” 

“He’ll make it all right,” said Soupbone. “I 
was goin’ to say how I used to read books about 
ships and sea-faring men.” 

Startlingly, silently, as if wafted upward from 
the cinders came Laska. They had seen his hand 
clutch the iron rail, and his arm and his whole 
body stretch with unbelievable grace and elasticity. 
No sign of strain or effort changed his face. He 
merely floated up to the platform and was aboard. 

“Say!” 

Laska’s face beamed: “It’s a great night, ain’t 
it?” 

“A mite chilly,” said Soupbone, looking over 
his shoulder toward the door. “I expect I’ll go 
set in the game.” He went slowly, hitching at 
his belt. 

After a time of silence the boy said to Laska: 
“They say you worked all over, everywhere, 
underground in tunnels, too.” 

“Ever work in the ground?” 

“Not yet. I been working for Bill Hatt — 
with cattle.” 

“Soupbone was telling me.” 

Dan wondered if the old man had casually 

119 


RIDER IN THE SUN 


betrayed him as to the manner of work he had 
done. Mostly his work had been with barbed 
wire, fence posts, and an adz. “Soupbone is old,” 
he said. “Must be sixty.” 

Laska grinned. “I could show you some 
things.” 

“Soupbone wants me to stick around with him.” 

He looked at Laska. Unaware, Laska stared 
out at the steel ribbons running into the dark be¬ 
hind the train. He seemed entranced with 
thoughts. They reflected in his eyes, which 
flashed like enemies of tranquillity. He began to 
hum. He had been humming for many moments 
before the boy’s ears caught the sound above the 
greater noises of the train. Laska was unaware 
that any one listened; and, as his humming grew 
louder, he seemed to gather a need to translate 
the humming into words, into the chant of home¬ 
less men. “The miles will make my footsteps 
slow before I see a perfect face, or put my feet 
upon a place from which I will not want to go.” 


120 


Chapter Eight 


1 


LAMO LASKA loved laughter, legend, 



and the company of men. He was the op¬ 
posite of repose, for in his mind some precious 
destination loomed inveterately. He told as¬ 
tounding and veracious tales. He told of mines, 
of tunnels, of steel-birds clinging to the skeletons 
of buildings. The hearts of his listeners beat 
faster with a renewed sensing of possibility. 
“Live on! Live on! ‘There is no end, no limit, 
measure, bound!’ ” 

He was on the way now to a great construc¬ 
tion job, the building of a tunnel sewer on the 
outskirts of a city. He told of Crip, the night 
watchman who at twenty-four had been blasted 
for life by an explosion. He told of Tommy 
Engine, who, with his one eye, saw all the myster¬ 
ies of the titan steam machines he operated. 
And he told of Big Stender, the foreman, who 
was always the first man down when the earth 


121 


RIDER IN THE SUN 


caved in upon his men. Stender was a saver of 
lives, a blasphemer against death, and a mocker 
of danger. 

Soupbone did not respond to Laska’s stories. 
Soupbone was a cattleman, in charge of a train¬ 
load of beef, and of a boy. He thought of 
nothing else. He welcomed each brief stop of 
the train, for then he could walk stiff-legged, like 
an old crane, peering into the cars. When a 
steer was down he would get into the car among 
the crowded beasts, reckless of being gored or 
trampled. And he would not come out until he 
had goaded the critter safely to its feet. 


2 


“I was always interested in traveling, same as 
you.” They sat together in the sunshine on the 
roof of a car. The old man looked furtively 
at the boy. Near by, other men lay about on 
the roof but, in the sound of the train, conversa¬ 
tion did not carry to them. 

“I was just like you, kid.” He hoped a sim- 

122 


RIDER IN THE SUN 


ilarity to his own youth might bring the boy closer 
to him. “I was telling you how I wanted to see 
the ocean. Always interested in boats and the 
ocean.” 

“The ocean’s nothing . . . just a lot of waves 
coming in.” 

“I expect that’s about all it is . . . well, six 
days more to the yards. You stick near me.” 

At the other end of the car Laska sprang up¬ 
right. “We’re on a siding!” 

They felt the shock of brakes, and the train 
slowed and stopped. A brakeman hurried along 
the roof-walk. “What’s up?” 

“Silk Special,” shouted the brakeman. 

“A Silk Special’s going through,” called Laska. 
“The fastest freight afloat. Right of way over 
anything.” 

“Why?” said Dan. 

Laska looked far to westward, but the train 
was not in sight. “They’re loaded with silk. 
Lot of money tied up. She’ll come like a bat 
out of hell.” 

Soupbone called to them. “Let’s take a look 
at them cattle!” 

“They’re all right. Why do you keep worry¬ 
ing ?” 


123 


RIDER IN THE SUN 


“They’re Bill’s cattle.” Soupbone climbed 
down the iron ladder to the roadbed. Laska and 
Dan followed reluctantly. 

They ran along the train, glancing into the 
stock cars, finishing their inspection hurriedly. 
Climbing again to the roof of a car Dan and 
Laska watched for the Special. They forgot 
the cattle. They forgot Soupbone who was still 
below prowling painstakingly from car to car. 

A metallic whisper awoke in the rails of the 
main line beside which their train rested on the 
siding. 

“Hear it?” Laska grinned, his eyes aglow. 
“Look! Look at it come! They don’t stop 
for nothing.” Speed and motion seemed to set 
him blazing. 

Watching Laska, the boy felt a mustering of 
wild sensations in his heart. He wanted to yell, 
to wave his arms, and dance. 

The smoke of the Special’s engine lay flat along 
the top of the train. Two flags, ripped with 
speed, flew at the boiler head. They saw a 
looming and waning flash of the engineer’s face, 
a blue elbow braced on the sill of the cab win¬ 
dow. 

The force of the wind as the Special shot by 

124 


RIDER IN THE SUN 


slapped at Dan’s clothes. The heat of the engine 
hit a surprising blow. A belligerent racket over¬ 
flowed his ears like the break of an iron wave 
along an iron shore. 

There were seven cars, all in perfect condition. 
On the rear platform of the caboose stood a 
trainman. For an instant he was a swollen 
blueish figure. An instant later he was a speck 
decaying in distance. Weeds and bits of paper 
danced belatedly in the wake of the train. A 
column of harsh dust arose, hurried, fell hope¬ 
lessly behind. 

“Pull a man clean apart to board one of them 
fast ones on the fly!” 

“Did you ever try?” 

Laska smiled, as if happily challenged by the 
thought. He waved at the train which, on a dis¬ 
tant curve, looked like a ruddy prehistoric worm. 
He gazed as though at a respected enemy. Then, 
shrugging his shoulders, he walked close to the 
edge of the car and glanced downward to the 
roadbed. 

Laska had taken off his hat. He stood crum¬ 
pling it in his hands, his black curly hair tumbling 
and flattening in the wind. He smiled at the 
twanging memory of the train, and as Dan 

125 


RIDER IN THE SUN 


watched, his glance went straight down to the 
cinders beside the car. 

The boy could not see what Laska saw, for 
he was behind and to one side of him, and the 
roof of the car interfered. But he saw the en¬ 
chantment wither and drift from Laska’s face 
like sun from a prairie when a cloud goes by. 

The boy was drawn by a morbid magnetism. 
He felt strength and confidence ebbing from him. 
He crawled on his hands and knees to the eaves 
of the car, face slack with curiosity. He looked 
down, strangely aware of one of Laska’s shoes 
protruding upon the margin of his vision. 

Feet hidden underneath the car, a man lay 
face down on the cinders. His hat rested not 
far from his head. The man moved as if, sigh¬ 
ing in his sleep, he were settling into a more rest¬ 
ful position. 

A kind of fear that he had never known be¬ 
fore rose in the boy and spread through him. 
The man moved again, so slowly that it could 
not have been by his own will but by the will of 
gravity alone. In the process the man’s head 
twisted upward revealing the side of his face. 

“Soupbone1” 

The old man’s eyes were open and sightless. 

126 


RIDER IN THE SUN 


It seemed a horrible and perverted restraint that 
kept the old man from answering, from closing 
his staring eyes. 

“Soupbone!” 

Dan clenched his fists and shook them up and 
down to the terror in his mind. 

“He’s dead! Soupbone’s dead!” 

Laska jumped off the eaves to the cinders. 
He knelt, peering intently into Soupbone’s face. 
Trainmen ran toward them. Cattlemen con¬ 
verged from two directions, their faces vastly 
different in shape, strangely alike in expression. 

The boy stared down at the group which en¬ 
circled the old man. He saw the backs of hud¬ 
dled heads, the tops of hats. He heard Laska 
talking: “He was working with the cattle. He 
must of been just nicked in the head. He must 
of been climbing the ladder when it went by, an’ 
he lost his balance, an’ it nicked him.” 

The conductor of the freight took a pencil 
from beneath his cap and wrote in a wrinkled 
book. When he had finished, he and every one 
stood around the old man. Some went close and 
peered at him. Others looked at him quickly 
and cautiously. Others looked in the direction 
the Special had gone. 


127 


RIDER IN THE SUN 


Finally the conductor and Laska picked up 
Soupbone and carried him back along the right of 
way to the caboose. 

After a long time the train started. The mark 
in the cinders where Soupbone had fallen slid 
away to westward. Near the spot, they had left 
the old man’s hat and Dan cried out when he saw 
it blow away in the wind. It blew behind a hill. 
He thought of its lying there, and of animals 
sniffing at it. 


3 


He lay quaking on the roof. When he opened 
his eyes he could see Soupbone. He could see 
him when his eyes were closed. He could see 
nothing else. He was frightened because of the 
belittling thoughts he had had regarding the old 
man. There was nothing wrong with him, he 
now told himself. He would guarantee to fight 
any one who said anything against Soupbone. He 
would defend his memory. Soupbone was a 
wonderful and perfect man. He was kind and 
gentle and quiet, and he had worked his whole 

128 


RIDER IN THE SUN 


life through. How could death happen to such 
a veteran and steadfast spirit? 

He thought with terrible intensity of Soupbone. 
If Soupbone could die like that, he, too, could 
die — suddenly, at any moment, maybe the very 
next. Soupbone was good and did not deserve 
to die. He did not deserve to die. 

It was the first time he had seen death. Its 
unexpectedness, its brutal unknowable machinery 
revolted and bewildered him. 

The car swayed and rocked under him. He 
dared not move. The sun sank, and the wind 
chilled him. Stars appeared tentatively, then 
brazenly. He tried to pray, to spill out the 
misery that was in him. “God, make it all right 
for Soupbone. He was good.” Beyond that 
he became confused and inarticulate. If God 
was worth anything why had He permitted Soup¬ 
bone to be killed? 

The car joggled unheedingly beneath him. The 
earth rolled on about its business. Nothing 
paused. Nothing paid homage to the snuffed 
life. The boy hammered his fists against the 
boards of the roof, hoping that the brief pains in 
his knuckles would unsnarl the knot in his throat. 

Soupbone! What was it like to die? If I 

129 


RIDER IN THE SUN 


died, what would it be like? He knew only that 
wind blew, and the old man couldn’t feel it. The 
cattle moaned. He couldn’t hear. He couldn’t 
taste or smell the autumn air. He couldn’t help 
himself, or hope, or remember. That was being 
dead. A thousand times blind. A thousand 
times deaf and dumb. It was unapproachable. 
It mocked united imaginations. It made the 
future seem tortuous, carnal and unrhyming. Ef¬ 
fort was a puff of cloud, planning pretentious, 
prayer nothing but voiced hope. 

Hard heels on the roof boards sounded in his 
ears. Laska stood over him, then kneeled beside 
him. “You’ll freeze up here.” 

Laska’s low encouraging voice loosed something 
in the boy. He shuddered and began to sob, 
his tears cold in the wind against his cheeks. 
“Laska, cinders were on his face.” 

“I brushed ’em off. Now forget it, see? It 
never hurt him for a second. He never knew 
what hit him. When a guy’s dead he’s all 
right.” 

“He — he gave me this hat.” 

“It never hurt him at all. Just click, and his 
clock stopped.” 

“How do you know?” 


130 


RIDER IN THE SUN 


4 


The caboose smelled of coal oil and the smoke 
of pipes and cigarettes. A man sleeping in the 
cupola was sprawled in an unenviable position. 
The others spoke pot-valiantly and drank from 
bottles. It was warm and there was light. In 
the early morning they left Soupbone in a town. 


131 


Chapter Nine 

1 

B UTTES receded, badlands dwindled, prairies 
reached as though trying for infinity. Then 
the towns grew larger and more frequent. The 
men on the cattle train stopped waving to people 
because there were so many that they tired of 
lifting their arms. Dan’s pass had been punched 
with a countless array of shapes: hearts, arrows, 
spearheads, circles, squares, ovals and triangles. 
His clothes had become a loose obnoxious skin, 
and he disliked the smell of himself. 

Far-wandering Laska laid the ghosts of miles 
with stories. He knew a hundred lingos. He 
spoke of mines, of mariners, marauders, muckers, 
gambling men. He told of cities, seas and sinners, 
narrating most fondly of the deep-trench men, 
the diggers in clay he was destined to join. 

132 


RIDER IN THE SUN 


2 


In the outskirts of the city they weighed the 
cars, and moved on into the stockyards. With a 
sad lack of banners and cheering, the trip was 
done, ceasing abruptly as if the train had been 
stopped by an inadvertent gate. But the rum¬ 
bling of wheels endured in Dan’s ears. He 
wondered how long the sound would persist be¬ 
fore, unhindered, he could hear other sounds. 

It struck him as absurd that the cattle he had 
driven through yellow dust among hills should 
now be ogling a city. In a pleasant melancholy 
way he felt sorry for them. 

Unheeding brakemen walked contentedly, din¬ 
ner pails in their hands. One, as he walked, 
gnawed a fat pickle. 

“Come on!” Laska hopped from the steps of 
the caboose. 

They went in search of the commission company 
to which Bill’s cattle were consigned. Dan ex¬ 
ulted at the completion of the long leg of the 
journey home. 

The commission company occupied a barnlike 

133 


RIDER IN THE SUN 


office. On its walls were lithographs of empty- 
headed steers with blue ribbons painted on them. 
A set of polished horns entitled “From Texas” 
spanned the top of the doorway. 

Laska saw a man behind a wicket at the back 
of the office. 

“Twelve cars of threes and fours,” Laska told 
him jauntily. “Lazy H.” 

“Lazy H.” The man’s face was red. 

“For Bill Hatt,” said Laska. 

“Yeh, I know,” said the red-faced man. 

Dan felt that they were now living in the 
moment for which Soupbone had died. He 
wondered if Soupbone were watching critically, 
or if such watching were a myth handed down 
through generations of Sunday school teachers. 

Outside the wind blew in boorish gusts through 
the aisles of holding pens. The moaning of 
beasts preyed upon his ears. The whole of life 
stank of flesh. Behind them some exhausted 
cattle staggered down an aisle, flanks painted 
green with their own manure. 

From behind the wicket the red-faced man 
came like an inquiring ferret. He carried docu¬ 
ments in his hands. The man had no chin and 
his hands were stubby and dirty. He licked his 

134 


RIDER IN THE SUN 


thumb and began to shuffle the documents. 
“What shape are they in?” 

“Good,” said Laska. “How’s prices?” 

“Never can tell. Think they’ll be good, an’ 
down they go.” The man wore a crownless straw 
hat. He did not appear observant of the season’s 
changes. The songs of birds or the odors of 
spring would perhaps have been nauseous to him. 
His perfume was the smell of old meat, his music 
the bawling of the doomed. 

He grunted and scuttled out of the door. 
They followed him into the cobbled alley. The 
man whistled. A dusky horse trotted to him, 
and he got groaning into the saddle. “Let’s take 
a look at ’em.” 


3 


Dan bent over a scarred desk in the commission 
office writing a note to Bill Hatt. “Dear Bill: 
I think everything is all right,” he had written. 
But Laska, looking over his shoulder, had taken 
the pen from his fingers and crossed out “I think.” 

135 


RIDER IN THE SUN 


Over and over in his mind Dan checked the 
details of instruction Bill Hatt had given Soup- 
bone in regard to the cattle. It seemed to him 
that he must have left out something of grave 
importance, yet he could not think what it was. 
The cattle were in safe hands waiting for a bid¬ 
der. Soupbone would nod approvingly from 
heaven and ride away forever. Dan’s throat 
ached from dust and melancholy. He must not 
forget anything that Soupbone would have done 
in connection with the cattle. He must not let 
his excitement at the prospect of home interfere 
with these inherited duties. 

“Is there anything we’d ought to do more 
than we’ve done?” 

‘We’re through.” 

They walked to the railroad terminal. Inside 
thousands of men and women strolled, sauntered, 
lounged, hurried, looked about them. 

A lighted sign said: Long Distance Tickets. 

Dan read intemperately. In a moment he 
would speak to the adroit man behind the grating. 
He stepped hesitantly in his direction, a slim 
smile on his lips. “Well, Laska — guess I’ll 
buy my ticket.” In a little while he would be 
gone. Everything would be at his back, pushing. 

136 


RIDER IN THE SUN 


Nothing but home ahead, no intermediate dilut¬ 
ing thoughts. 

“I'll be drifting, too,” said Laska. “I’ll grab 
a flyer in the yards. A man’s a fool to pay for 
riding.” 

Dan laughed, “Well . . . well, so-long.” 

They shook hands. Dan stared, embarrassed. 
Finally Laska pulled his hat forward over his 
eyes in a strikingly familiar gesture. It meant 
a period to an episode in his life, and the simul¬ 
taneous birth of new adventure. He waved his 
hand and laughed so that his black forelock 
shook below his hat brim. “Here goes! So- 
long!” He weaved away with a great lift in 
his stride, and, vanishing in the crowd, he left a 
most magnificent imaginary wake wherein ma¬ 
chinery rumbled, miles unfolded, and the din of 
industry echoed. 

Dan turned toward the ticket window. He 
thought that the man behind the grating would 
be impressed by the remoteness of his destination. 
He spoke the name of his home town with a 
proud shiver. “One way.” 

The man was very casual. To him far places 
in any direction were names on strips of paper 
at certain prices. “Plunk!” went the rubber 

137 


RIDER IN THE SUN 


stamp under his emphatic fist. “Plunk! Plunk!” 
He folded the ticket and whipped it into an en¬ 
velope. “Thirty-five, eighty-five.” 


4 


People settled and sighed in green seats, some 
trying pontifically to read, some looking from 
windows, some waving at friends whom Dan 
could not see. Their lips moved hastily with 
messages of instruction, admonition, farewell. 
The train moved in a luxury of silence in compar¬ 
ison to the cattle train. Dan’s ears, having ac¬ 
quired unbreakable habits during the past eight 
days, distinctly heard the bawl of a steer. 

He knew that somewhere in the yawning yards 
Alamo Laska would soon be boarding a train. 
He knew that Laska would ride alone in the dark 
and cold; and if he got caught or missed his foot¬ 
ing he would go gaily to jail or to his doom. He 
was as irrepressible, as dominating, as confident 
as tide. 

The boy stared at the stream of rails beneath 

138 


RIDER IN THE SUN 


the window. Smooth enough to be water I 
Straight as a line! Built by men who maybe 
saw the finished fence. 

He had dreamed for months of this moment. 
He had sampled and sapped its sensations. He 
had dreamed of the feeling on the back of his 
head of this upholstery. He had invoked the 
senses of this very second, thinking of it then as 
the most beautiful probability in all future. 

But he sat now tense and wide awake, com¬ 
paring his own small traveling to Laska’s. He 
was aware of being the only one on the whole 
train who knew of Laska, of Laska’s adventur¬ 
ing. Occasionally in the peace of this setting 
he almost doubted there was such a person as 
Laska. It was easy to doubt, for everything 
about him was improbable and untouchable. He 
was mystery, rumor, tension, vibration, singing, 
laughter, legend, daring, not mere flesh and bone. 
He never suffered. He acknowledged no pain, 
no unpleasantness, no defeat. He was so accus¬ 
tomed to hunger that it was no enemy. He met 
men and knew them instantly as friends. He 
departed from them as lightly as though they 
were felons. Laska never appeared asleep, never 
resting, never motionless except against some 

139 


RIDER IN THE SUN 


startling background. He would be rocking on 
his feet, laughing, singing in a shack in the rain 
— dizzy, dissipated, drunk with journeys. 

Dan could not remain in his seat. His 
dreamed-of lassitude did not exist. Twice he 
walked the length of the train. Where are 
you, Laska? Where are you going? Who is 
going with you? Why are you going? 


5 


The train crawled with caution into an ornate 
station. Supporting the roof of the station were 
steel pillars. A few people scurried in and out 
among the pillars. It was early in the morning, 
many hours before light. 

Dan’s glance kept even with a man who walked 
toward a pillar. Leaning against the pillar was a 
second man who looked in idle irony at the train. 
Dan started up, white with amazement. The 
man was Alamo Laska. 

Dan knew he was looking at a ghost. He 
cowered on the seat, cringed from the window 

140 


RIDER IN THE SUN 


and crept down the narrow corridor into the 
vestibule between the cars where he stood spy¬ 
ing fearfully out into the station. 

Laska was still there, the trainmen eyeing him 
sourly. His gaze, wanly innocent, roved in pa¬ 
tient inspection of the station ceiling. Dan let 
out a laughing half-sane whoop and sprang down 
the steps and across the platform. Laska spotted 
him instantly, and in a mild voice said: “Enjoy 
the trip? I got in about a month ago.” 

“You what?” 

The trainmen growled at Laska with splendid 
savagery, but swayed toward the train as it be¬ 
gan to move. 

“Laska,” cried Dan, backing uncertainly toward 
the train. “Say!” 

“Take a guess,” said Laska. One of the train¬ 
men swore with his lips, and, as the train began 
to move, Laska laughed aloud into his face. 

“Get aboard, Dan. You’ll get left!” 

Dan gazed stupidly at the train. A porter 
trotted awkwardly beside it, his face round and 
perturbed. He waved his rubber-matted step 
at Dan. Dan, his eyes blank, waved at the por¬ 
ter. Flinging his steps into the vestibule the 
porter shouted: “Hurry an’ get on! Hurry!” 

141 


RIDER IN THE SUN 


“Go ahead! I don’t care! Go on!” Dan 
heard himself laughing. Laska, too, was laugh¬ 
ing, and they were shaking hands and making a 
small celebration around the pillar. 

“Go on! Get out of here!” yelled Dan to the 
train. His face ached with laughter and yelling. 
“Get a-going! Don’t stop for me!” 

He felt as if a small band of demons danced 
delightedly inside of him. The rear-end platform 
of the train grew small, faded and became red 
lights. 

“Laska! Were you on that train ?” 

“Sure. I caught her blind end in the yards.” 


6 


They were walking in the dark in a lot at the 
outskirts of the city. At regular intervals they 
passed ghostly signposts marking the corners of 
future streets. At length they turned away into 
a void of darkness. Then far ahead a light 
flickered, tiny in the abyss of night. 

“What’s that?” 


142 


RIDER IN THE SUN 


“Crip’s night fire, I’ll bet a hat.” 

With each step, unfamiliar things took shape 
in the light from the fire. A man appeared sit¬ 
ting on a box beside it. Directly behind the man 
a great monster of iron rose to an unknown 
height, spread to an unknown and dismaying 
width. Metal gleamed upon the monster. Dan 
spoke in a whisper: “What’s that?” 

“The machine! Wasn’t I telling you?” 

Dan stumbled, instinctively recovered himself 
and went on. 

The figure beside the fire came erect. “Who’s 
there?” 

“Hello, Crip!” Laska strode boldly into the 
firelight. The night watchman squinted at them 
over the fire. Dan noticed that one side of his 
face was nothing but scar. A gun rested on the 
box where he had been sitting. 

“Well, I’ll be gah-damned! Laska!” 

“Sure!” 

They shook hands and immediately asked clan¬ 
nish questions about their doings, their friends, 
and other years. Dan thought that Laska had 
forgotten him, but suddenly he turned around and 
grabbed him by the arm. “This kid wants to 
work underground.” 


143 


RIDER IN THE SUN 


Crip turned his head, showing his scalded and 
misshapen face. He thrust out a hand. Dan 
grasped it, recoiled as if a snake had craned its 
neck into his face. The fingers of the hand were 
stiff, curved, cold. They were of steel. 

“Sit down,” said Crip. 

Dan looked from face to face, from shadow 
to shadow. Always in the background he felt 
the machine — gloomy, threatening, capable. 

“We got a big job here, twenty-nine thousand 
feet open cut, eighteen inch pipe.” 

“Open cut?” “Most of it’s pretty deep.” 

“Deep!” “Tommy’s got the machine set to 
around thirty feet.” 

Laska grinned. 

The words held no accurate meanings for Dan, 
but they sounded immense, like the gossip of em¬ 
perors. 

At daylight, they said good-bye to Crip and 
went in search of a room in which to live. 

“I ought to write a letter.” 

“A letter?” 

“I ought to let my mother and father know.” 

“God! Twenty-nine thousand, open cut!”, 
Laska said. 


144 


RIDER IN THE SUN 


7 


Dear Mother: 

I thought I was coming home, but I guess I 
better not for a while. I do not know what 
made me get off the train. I just looked out 
and saw Laska and then I got off and stayed off. 
Laska is a man I met. He has done al¬ 
most everything. He has been everywhere. 
Things happen everywhere he goes. 

I have been working already for three days, 
on a big sewer construction job. Laska and 
I lay pipe in the bottom of the trench behind 
the digging machine. You ought to see it dig. 
It is noon hour now and raining and cold. 
But we never stop for rain, because if we do 
the mud oozes into the pipe we have laid and 
then the inspector makes you do it all over 
again. So in a minute I am going out again. 
Laska and I and a man named Nick Christo¬ 
pher are the only ones working. This is Sun¬ 
day, and besides the surface gang goes home 
when it rains. But we have got to keep the 
pipe open. 


145 


RIDER IN THE SUN 

I do not know why I left the train hut I 
wanted to and I did. Please do not think it 
was because I did not want to come back to you 
and father, because I do. Mother, if you knew 
how I have been thinking of you all this time 
you would understand. But I wanted to go 
with Laska. 

Love, 

Dan 


t 


146 


Chapter Ten 


1 



CITY was spreading outward, like spilled 


JL\. water spreading on a floor. Here the city 
was little more than a blueprint and a scar on the 
prairie. When the unknown planner set to 
work, doubtless his dream was beautiful. Doubt¬ 
less he reached into the future, and, though he 
touched nothing, a glow was in his mind. He 
saw the fine aspect. He heard no sounds of 
harshness in his streets. He skipped their build¬ 
ing, and looked upon them built. He viewed 
them in sunshine. He saw no poverty, no hun¬ 
ger. He felt no fear, no pain. The men and 
women walking in his streets and living in his 
houses bore no burden of reality. Where went 
his vision, there went the planner lightly and with¬ 
out footprints, scorning the dull delinquency of 
truth. 


147 


RIDER IN THE SUN 


2 


Three figures leaned against the slanting rain 
— Alamo Laska, Nick Christopher, and the boy 
who had run away from home. They rested on 
their long-handled shovels and as they gazed into 
the crater which by their brawn they had hollowed 
in the earth, the blue clay oozed back again, slowly 
devouring the fruits of their toil. 

Laska, the nomad, thought of the wild geese 
winging southward to warm bayous. Nick’s 
heart, under the bone and muscle of his great 
chest, swelled with sweet thoughts of his wife 
and child who lived in a foreign city across an 
ocean. The boy felt the sting of rain against 
his cheeks and dreamed of his mother who seemed 
lovely and far away. 

It was Sunday. The regular deep-trench gang 
lounged in their warm boarding house and drank 
dago red, while out on the job the three men 
toiled alone. They breathed heavily, and the 
gray steam crawled upon their backs, for it was 
cold. 


RIDER IN THE SUN 


“Look at ’er filling in,” growled Laska, “faster 
than a man could dig.” 

“Mud’s get inna pipe,” said Nick. “The In¬ 
spector make us tear him out if she fill any more.” 

Backed close to the edge of the crater stood 
the trench-digging machine. A broken piston had 
crippled its engines and they were swathed in tar¬ 
paulin. 

A long gray mound stretched away from the 
crater opposite the machine. Buried thirty feet 
below the mound was the new-laid sewer pipe. 
From the bottom of the pit at the machine, the 
pipe ran a hundred yards horizontally under the 
surface, opening in a manhole. This hundred 
yards of new-laid pipe was the reason for the 
three men digging in the rain. They had dug 
eleven hours trying to uncover the open end of 
the pipe in order to seal it against the mud. But 
rain and ooze and storm had bested them. The 
bank had caved, and the mud had crawled into 
the mouth of the pipe, partly obstructing it. 

“It’s getting dark fast,” said Laska, “an’ we’re 
licked.” 

“We can’t do any more,” said Dan. 

Scraping the mud from his shovel, Nick looked 
up into the whirlpools of the sky. “In a year I 

149 


RIDER IN THE SUN 


go old country. I see my wife. I see my kid.” 

“Nick,” said Laska, “go over to the shanty 
and get a couple of lanterns and telephone Sten- 
der. Tell him if he don’t want the Inspector 
on our tail to get out here quick with a gang, 
Sunday or no Sunday.” 

Nick stuck his shovel in the mud and moved 
away across the plain toward the shanty. 

The cold crept into the boy. It frightened 
him, and in the darkness his eyes sought Laska’s 
face. “How could we clean out the pipe, even 
when the gang got down to it?” 

“Maybe we could flush her out with a fire 
hose,” said Laska. 

“There’s no water plug within a mile.” 

Laska said nothing. 

Picking up his damp shirt, Dan pulled it on 
over his head. He did not tuck in the tails, and 
they flapped in the wind, slapping against him. 
He looked like a gaunt, serious bird, striving to 
leave the ground. He was bare-headed, his yel¬ 
low hair matted and stringy with dampness. His 
face was thin, a little sunken, and fine drops of 
moisture clung to the fuzz on his cheeks. His 
lips were blue with cold. 

Laska stared into the pit. It was too dark to 

150 


RIDER IN THE SUN 


see bottom, but something in the black hole fas¬ 
cinated him. “If we could get a rope through 
the pipe we could drag sandbags through into 
the manhole. That would clean her out in good 
shape.” 

“How could we get a rope through?” 

“Stender’ll know.” Laska walked over to the 
digging machine and leaned against its towering 
side. The rain had turned to sleet. “It’s cold.” 

Dan went close to Laska for warmth and 
friendship. “How could we get a rope through?” 

Laska’s shoulders lifted slowly. “You’ll see. 
You’ll see when Stender gets here. Say, it’s 
freezing.” 

After a long time of waiting, a light flamed 
into being in the shanty, and they heard the 
muffled scraping of boots on the board floor. 
When the shanty door opened, a rectangle of 
light stood out sharply. Swart figures crossed 
and re-crossed the lighted area, pouring out into 
the storm. 

“Ho!” called Laska. 

“Ho!” came the answer, galloping to them in 
the wind. 

They heard the rasping of caked mud on dun¬ 
garees, the clank of shovels, the voice of Stender. 

151 


RIDER IN THE SUN 


Lanterns swung like yellow pendulums. Long- 
legged shadows reached and receded. 

The diggers gathered about the rim of the pit, 
staring. Stender’s face showed in the lantern 
light. His lips were wrinkled, as if constantly 
prepared for blasphemy. He was a tall, cursing 
conqueror. Orders shot from his throat, and 
noisily the men descended into the pit and began 
to dig. They drew huge gasping breaths like 
beasts mired and struggling. 

The boy watched, his eyes bulged in the dark. 
Hitherto he had thought very briefly of sewers, 
regarding them as unlovely things. But Laska 
and Nick and Stender gave them splendor and 
importance. The deep-trench men were admir¬ 
able monsters. They knew the clay, the feel and 
pattern of it, for it had long been heavy in their 
minds and muscles. They were big in three di¬ 
mensions and their eyes were black and barbarous. 
When they ate it was with rough and tumble 
relish, and as their bellies fattened, they spoke 
tolerantly of enemies. They played lustily with 
a view to satiation. They worked stupendously. 
They were diggers in clay, transformed by lan¬ 
tern light into a race of giants. 

Through the rain came Stender, his black 

152 


RIDER IN THE SUN 


slicker crackling. “They’re down. Angelo just 
struck the pipe.” 

Laska grunted. 

Stender blew his nose with his fingers, walked 
away and climbed down into the hole. They lost 
sight of him as he dropped over the rim. The 
sound of digging ceased and two or three men 
on the surface rested on their shovels, the light 
from below gleaming in their flat faces. Laska 
and the boy knew that Stender was examining the 
pipe. They heard him swearing at what he had 
found. 

After a moment he clambered up over the rim 
and held up a lantern. His cuddy, gripped firmly 
between his teeth, was upside down to keep out 
the wet. 

“Some one’s got to go through the pipe,” he 
said, raising his voice. “There’s fifty bucks for 
the man that’ll go through the pipe into the man¬ 
hole with a line tied to his foot. Fifty bucks!” 

There was a moment of quiet. The men 
thought of the fifty dollars, and furtively meas¬ 
ured themselves against the deed at hand. It 
seemed to Dan that he was the only one who 
feared the task. He did not think of the fifty 
dollars, but only of the fear. Three hundred 

153 


RIDER IN THE SUN 


feet through a rat hole eighteen inches in diame¬ 
ter. Three hundred feet of muck, of wet black 
dark, and no turning back. But, if he did not 
volunteer, they would know that he was afraid. 
He stepped from behind Laska and said uncer¬ 
tainly: “I’ll go, Stender,” and he wished he might 
snatch back the words for, looking about him, he 
saw that not a man among those present could 
have wedged his shoulders into the mouth of an 
eighteen-inch pipe. Had they known he would 
be the only volunteer? 

Stender came striding over holding the lantern 
above his head. He peered into the boy’s face. 
“Take off your clothes.” 

“My clothes?” 

“That’s what I said.” 

“You might get a buckle caught in a joint,” 
said Laska. “See?” 

He saw only that he had been trapped. At 
home he could have been openly fearful, for at 
home everything about him was known. There, 
quite simply, he could have said: “I won’t do it. 
I’m frightened. I’ll be killed.” But here the 
diggers in clay were lancing him with looks. And 
Laska was holding a ball of line, one end of which 
would be fastened to his ankle. 


154 


RIDER IN THE SUN 


“Just go in a sweater,” said Laska. “A 
sweater an’ boots over your woolens. We’ll 
be waiting for you at the manhole.” 

He wanted so desperately to dive off into the 
night that he felt his legs bracing for a spring, 
a tight feeling in his throat. Then, mechanically, 
he began to take off his clothes. Nick had gone 
clumping off to the shanty and shortly he returned 
with a pair of hip boots. “Here, kid. I get 
’em warm for you inna shanty.” 

He thrust his feet into the boots, and Laska 
knelt and tied the heavy line to his ankle. “Too 
tight?” 

“No. It’s all right — I guess.” 

“Well — come on.” 

They walked past Stender who was pacing up 
and down among the men. They slid down into 
the crater, deepened now by the diggers. They 
stood by the open mouth of the pipe thirty feet 
below the surface of the ground. 

Laska reached down and tugged at the knot 
he had tied in the line, then he peered into the 
entrance of the tube. He peered cautiously, as 
if he thought it might be inhabited by fiends. 
The boy’s glance wandered up the wet sides of 
the pit. 


155 


RIDER IN THE SUN 


Over the rim a circle of bland yellow faces 
glared at him. Sleet tinkled against lanterns, 
spattered down and stung his flesh. 

“Go ahead in.” 

He blanched. 

“Just keep thinking of the manhole, where 
you’ll come out.” 

His throat contracted, seemed to be bursting 
with pressure from inside. He got down on his 
belly in the slush-ice and mud. It penetrated 
slowly to his skin, and spread over him. He put 
his head inside the mouth of the pipe, drew back 
In horror. Some gibbering words flew from his 
lips. His voice sounded preposterously loud. 
Laska’s was already shopworn with distance. 
“You can make it! Go ahead.” 

He lay on his left side, and, reaching out with 
his left arm, caught a joint and drew himself in. 
The mud oozed up around him, finding its way 
upon him, welling up against the left side of his 
face. He pressed his right cheek against the 
ceiling of the pipe to keep the muck from covering 
his mouth and nose. Laska was gone! Laska 
was in another world— a sane world of night, of 
storm and the glow of lanterns. 

“Are you all right, kid?” 

156 


RIDER IN THE SUN 


Dan cried out, his ears ringing with his cry 
reechoing from the sides of the pipe. The sides 
hemmed him, pinned him, closed him in on every 
side with their paralyzing circumference. 

There is no darkness like the darkness under¬ 
ground that miners know. It borrows something 
from night, from tombs, from places used by bats. 
Such fluid black can terrify a flame, and suffocate, 
and drench a mind with madness. There is a 
fierce desire to struggle, to beat one’s hands 
against the prison. The boy longed to lift his 
pitiful human strength against the walls. He 
longed to claw at his eyes in the mad certainty 
that more than darkness curtained them. 

He had moved but a few feet on his journey 
when panic swept him. Ahead of him the mud 
had pushed up a stolid wave. Putting forth his 
left hand, he felt a scant two inches of air space 
between the wave’s crest and the ceiling of the 
pipe. There was nothing to do but go back. 
If he moved ahead it meant death by suffocation. 
He tried to back away, but caught his toe in a 
joint of the pipe. He was entombed! In an 
hour he would be a body. The cold and damp¬ 
ness would kill him before they could dig down 
to him. Nick and Laska would pull him from 

157 


RIDER IN THE SUN 


the muck, and Laska would say: “Click, and his 
clock stopped. He never felt a thing.” 

He thrashed with delirious strength against 
his prison. The skin ripped from the backs of 
his hands as he flailed the rough walls. And 
some gods must have snickered, for above the 
walls of the pipe were thirty feet of unyielding 
clay, eight thousand miles of earth below. A 
strength, a weight, a night, each a thousand times 
his most revolting dream, leaned upon the boy, 
depressing, crushing, stamping him out. The 
ground gave no cry of battle. It did no bleeding, 
suffered no pain, uttered no groans. It flattened 
him silently. It swallowed him in its foul des¬ 
potism. It leaned its merciless weight upon his 
mind. It was so inhuman, so horribly incogni¬ 
zant of the God men swore had made it. 

In the midst of his frenzy, when he had beaten 
his face against the walls until it bled, he heard 
a voice he knew was real, springing from human 
sympathy. “Are you all right, kid?” 

In that instant he loved Laska as he loved his 
life. Laska’s voice sheered the weight from him, 
scattered the darkness, brought him new balance 
and a hope to live. 

“Fine!” he answered in a cracking yell. He 

158 


RIDER IN THE SUN 


yelled again, loving the sound of his voice, and 
thinking how foolish yelling was in such a place. 

With his left hand he groped ahead and found 
that the wave of mud had settled, levelled off by 
its own weight. He drew his body together, 
pressing it against the pipe. He straightened, 
moved ahead six inches. His fingers found a 
loop of oakum dangling from a joint, and he 
pulled himself on, his left arm forward, his right 
arm behind over his hip, like a swimmer’s. 

He had vanquished panic, and he looked ahead 
to victory. Each joint brought him twenty inches 
nearer his goal. Each twenty inches was a pla¬ 
teau which enabled him to vision a new plateau 
— the next joint, a brief deceitful rest upon a 
march. 

He had been more than an hour on the way. 
He did not know how far he had gone, a third, 
perhaps even a half of the distance. He forgot 
the present, forgot fear, wet, cold, blackness; he 
lost himself in dreaming of the world of men out¬ 
side. It was as if he were a small superb island 
in hell. 

He did not know how long he had been count¬ 
ing the joints, but he found himself whispering 
good numbers: “Fifty-one, fifty-two, fifty-three 

159 


RIDER IN THE SUN 


-” Each joint, when he thought of it, ap¬ 
peared to take up a vast time of squirming in the 
muck, and the line dragged heavily behind his 
foot. 

Suddenly, after staring into the darkness until 
his eyes hurt, he saw a pallid ray. He closed 
his eyes, opened them and looked again. The ray 
was real, and he uttered a whimper of relief. He 
knew that the ray must come from Stender’s lan¬ 
tern. He pictured Stender and a group of the 
diggers huddled in the manhole, waiting for him. 
The men and the manhole grew magnificent in 
his mind. He thought of them worshipfully. 

“Seventy-six, seventy-seven, seventy-eight-” 

The ray grew slowly. It took an oval shape, 
and the oval grew fat, like an egg, then round. 
It was a straight line to the manhole, and the mud 
had thinned. 

Through the pipe and into the boy’s ears rum¬ 
bled a voice like half-hearted thunder. It was 
Stender’s voice: “How you makin’ it?” 

“Fine!” His cry came pricking back into his 
ears like a shower of needles. 

There followed a long span of numbness. The 
cold and wet had dulled his senses, so that when¬ 
ever the rough ceiling of the pipe scraped his face 

160 




RIDER IN THE SUN 


he did not feel it; so that struggling in the muck 
became an almost pleasant and normal thing, 
since all elements of fear and pain and imagina¬ 
tion had been removed. Warmth and dryness 
became alien to him. He was a creature native 
to darkness, foreign to light. 

The round yellow disk before him gave him his 
only sense of living. It was a sunlit landfall, 
luring him on. He would close his eyes and 
count five joints, then open them quickly, cheer¬ 
ing himself at the perceptible stages of progress. 

Then, abruptly it seemed, he was close to the 
manhole. He could hear men moving. He 
could see the outline of Stender’s head as Stender 
peered into the mouth of the pipe. Men kneeled, 
pushing each other’s heads to one side in order 
to watch him squirm toward them. They began 
to talk excitedly. He could hear them breathing, 
see details — and Stender and Laska reached in. 
They got their hands on him. They hauled 
him to them, as if he were something they wanted 
to inspect scientifically. He felt as if they 
thought he was a rarity, a thing of great oddness. 
The light dazzled him. It began to move around 
and around, and to dissolve into many lights, 
some of which danced locally on a bottle. He 

161 


RIDER IN THE SUN 

heard Stender’s voice: “He made it! He made 
it all right.” 

“Here, kid,” said Laska, holding the bottle 
to his mouth. “Drink all you can hold.” 

He could not stand up. He believed calmly 
that his flesh and bones were constructed of putty. 
He could hear no vestige of the song of triumph 
he had dreamed of hearing. He looked stupidly 
at his hands, which bled painlessly. He could 
not feel his arms and legs at all. He was a vast 
sensation of lantern light and the steam of hu¬ 
mans breathing in a damp place. 

Faces peered at him. The faces were curious, 
and impressed. He felt a clouded, uncompre¬ 
hending resentment against them. Stender held 
him up on one side, Laska on the other. They 
looked at each other across him. Suddenly 
Laska stooped and gathered him effortlessly into 
his arms. 

“You’ll get covered with mud,” mumbled the 
boy. 

“He made it all right,” said Stender. “Save 
us tearing out the pipe.” 

“Hell with the pipe,” said Laska. “Untie 
the line.” 

The boy’s wet head fell against Laska’s chest. 

162 


RIDER IN THE SUN 


He felt the rise and fall of Laska’s muscles, and 
knew that Laska was climbing with him up the 
iron steps inside the manhole. Night wind smote 
him. He buried his head deeper against Laska. 
Laska’s body became a mountain of warmth. He 
felt a heavy sighing peace, like a soldier who has 
been comfortably wounded and knows that war 
for him is over. 


% 


163 


Chapter Eleven 


1 

F OR many days afterward, thoughts of his 
experience in the pipe produced a curious 
conflict in him. His reason promoted a calm 
comparison between his achievement and the dis¬ 
tances to stars. His emotions set up an array 
of worldly congratulations until he grew portly 
with pride. In this mood he believed himself 
superior to such monotonous persons as his 
mother and father; and he came gradually to 
regard his own future as a sprightly and gallop¬ 
ing journey. 

After a time the detail of his night’s adven¬ 
ture lost the brutality of outline. His memory 
grasped only the fact of his triumph, his proved 
courage, the monosyllabic comments of the men 
who had seen him through. 

Each day he and Laska worked side by side 
in the cramped quarters at the bottom of the 
trench. Stender had remarked that they made 

164 


RIDER IN THE SUN 


the best team of pipe layers he had ever seen. 
This seemed an important and noteworthy utter¬ 
ance, and he began to form bloated opinions of 
himself: there is nothing I cannot do. 

He had grown accustomed to working under¬ 
ground, to balancing on the slippery bottom of 
the trench, to half-light, to the buckets thudding 
into the clay so close to him. He felt that be¬ 
cause these dangers were no longer strange, they 
were no longer dangerous, and he became reck¬ 
less. 


2 


Alamo Laska, leaning against a great steel 
beam, sang softly. No listener would have 
stirred, for restlessness was in his voice and in 
the words that he sang. The words sprang 
from some hidden background which the boy had 
not hitherto suspected. 

Doe on the river shore, drinking, drinking, 
Lynx in the cedars . Wonder what he's 
thinkingf 


165 


RIDER IN THE SUN 


Smoke on an island, twisting, blowing . 

Man by a night fire. Wonder where he’s 
going? 

In the dusk the trench machine loomed shad¬ 
owy and terrible. The air was heavy with the 
odor of wet clay. The thump of a steam pump, 
like a giant metronome, established the rhythm 
of Laska’s half-sung song. 

Dan sat beside him, his wiry legs dangling over 
the edge of a pile of stringers. The lights on 
the far shore of the river puzzled him pleasantly. 
He fell to wondering who had turned them on 
and to light what. 

Out in the channel a dark shape moved. He 
heard the sound of engines churning, and of 
water sweeping by. Yonder an iron ship glided. 
On the ship were men. One stood in the dark¬ 
ened pilot house close to the binnacle, watching 
the needle, guarding the lives of ship and crew 
and seeing in his mind a safe arrival and a jour¬ 
ney’s end. 

Indistinct, illusory, suggestive, these percep¬ 
tions crept into the boy, swelling his spirit. But 
he was not happy. He could not isolate for ex¬ 
amination the phantoms of distress which haunted 

166 


RIDER IN THE SUN 


him. He need fear no crisis. He had achieved. 
He was as good as the diggers in clay, as good at 
their own game. But he was not happy. 

“Man by a night fire, wonder where he’s go¬ 
ing?” Laska sang. 

He felt suddenly that Laska’s singing was not 
a product of happiness, but of discontent. His 
voice held a quality of slumberless woe, like the 
chanting of convicts. 

The wind came surging across the river. 
Laska had remarked frequently upon the cold, 
saying it was time to be moving south, saying 
with redoubtable emphasis that men should come 
and go as they pleased, that only fools and pris¬ 
oners remained in one place. 

Suddenly Laska’s song broke short. His hand 
shot out toward the boy. His dark head was 
thrown back. He stood up, seeming to stretch 
inches above his normal height. Dan knew by 
the feel of Laska’s hand upon his arm, by the 
way his eyes strained upward that in the realm of 
nomads something big was transpiring. 

“Listen! Listen to that!” 

Dan stared up into the night. He saw noth¬ 
ing; but a remote rushing sound came down to 
him. It seemed to have no origin, but to fall 

167 


RIDER IN THE SUN 


out of boundless space. He did not know the 
sound. He could think only of a ship with un¬ 
charted waters hissing at its bow; a voice plead¬ 
ing from a derelict. It was the summing chord 
of all wandering, all migration, all adventure. 
It had the quality music sometimes has of making 
its hearers afraid of nothing. 

“What is it?” 

Laska held up his hand, waiting until the 
sound died before he answered: “Geese going 
south.” 

Laska chuckled: “Say! Do you know where 
they come from? Hudson’s Bay! The Arctic 
circle! That’s traveling! Jesus! I’m an¬ 
chored compared to them.” 

Laska’s hand closed on Dan’s arm. “What 
do you say we finish out the week — then head 
south! What do you say?” 

Unaccountably, obtruding upon the lure of 
Laska’s personality, Dan remembered the calm 
rain on the roof of his home. He smelled the 
odor of cedar, saw the smoke rise from dead 
grass burning on the lawn. He heard the rustle 
of leaves trickling down through the branches 
of elms. He choked with the clearness of these 
imagined things. 


168 


RIDER IN THE SUN 


Laska was thumping his shoulders. “Hell 
with finishing! Let’s go to-morrow night!” 

“What about Stender?” 

“Hell with Stender!” 

“Go south? Where, south?” 

It mattered little to Laska whether the boy 
went with him or not, but he began to speak cal- 
culatingly of the example set by the geese. He 
told of river deltas, of a shallow southern ocean, 
of palms and mangroves, of the mysteries of 
cypress swamps, bayous. “In three days we can 
be down where the niggers sing on the levees. 
You’ll hear yarns from Step-alone and Sunny 
North and others of the bunch. They’ll make 
you hold your breath. That’s the way to live! 
Hell with finishing!” 

The boy gazed at the river lights, spellbound 
in his whelming sense of motion. The world 
seemed tumbling, moving, vastly traveling. 
Wings rustled, air swirled, lights danced, pistons 
churned, the river flowed deathlessly. Where? 
Where was it all going? Why? It was like 
the Rider , never stopping except to see new dis¬ 
tances, new horizons beyond which it would soon 
be lost. 

Laska regarded him trickily. “That was a 

169 


RIDER IN THE SUN 

nervy thing you did, crawling through that rat 
hole.” 

“It doesn’t seem so — now.” 

“You’re getting husky. Arms like iron.” 

“I been working a long time, Laska. That’s 
why.” He gazed straight at Laska, trying to 
distinguish his features in the darkness. Laska 
was giddy, topsy-turvy. Hell with finishing! 
Of a sudden that seemed to be the essence of 
Laska. 

He inquired abruptly of himself about the 
condition of the world, if it contained only men 
who said Hell with finishing. Nothing would 
be achieved. There would be no completion. 
Buildings would be roofless. Boats would be 
rudderless. Mountains would be half-climbed. 
Rivers would not reach the sea. There would 
be no aspiration, and life would have only a snick¬ 
ering false-fronted majesty. 

“I’m going home.” 

“You’ll never go home!” 

I m going. 

“Well, go ahead. I’m going down to Patsy’s.” 

“Patsy’s?” 

“Sure, I haven’t been drunk for two months.” 

Dan was frightened. He had never seen 

170 


RIDER IN THE SUN 


Laska in such an abandoned mood. “You can’t 
get drunk. You got to work under the machine 
to-morrow!” 

Laska whipped his coat from where it lay upon 
the steel beam and swung away toward the river. 


3 


Dan came into an avenue, blinking in the light 
of an arc lamp. An empty street car joggled by. 
Late at night cars made a howling noise. All 
other sounds had quit, leaving a free field. 

He crossed a vacant lot back of a packing plant 
and came to the rooming house. In the room 
he undressed and snuggled under the blankets 
with a long rapturous sigh. “I’m going home.” 
You ran from home because everything about it 
was familiar, and you returned for the same 
reason. 

Somewhere a clock struck. A dark breeze 
stole through the window and made the curtain 
wave silently toward him. He shivered a little. 
The curtain was like a hand saying farewell. 

171 


RIDER IN THE SUN 


4 


“Up with the larks I” It was Laska’s voice 
waking him. 

“Didn’t you go to bed at all?” 

“Waste of time to sleep.” 

Dan dressed, and together they went to a 
near-by restaurant. Laska was in high spirits. 
He hooked his heels on the rungs of the stool 
and spanked the counter with his big hands. 
“Ham and eggs and coffee!” He held up his 
hands in front of him. They were shaking. 

After they had eaten, they walked to the edge 
of the city. They started across a field, shoes 
glistening in the damp grass as they approached 
the machine. 

From the shanty came one-eyed Tommy En¬ 
gine, carrying a satchel of wrenches and a can of 
oil. He brooded over the machine, walking com¬ 
pletely around it. He dragged the tarpaulin 
from its engines, surveyed its bulk with furtive 
pride. He picked up a mattock, broke some 
kindling and lit a fire under the boiler. Then he 

172 


RIDER IN THE SUN 


climbed to the iron pilot seat, cushioned it with 
his greasy coat and sat down, enthroned. He 
did not glance at Laska or the boy, but sat watch¬ 
ing his gauges. He alone understood this iron 
animal, and his love for it lifted him above the 
run of men. 

The day gang filtered in twos and threes from 
the shanty, gathering near the machine to bask in 
its oily warmth. Tommy Engine scorned them. 
He was a disdainful monarch austere among hand- 
toiling pygmies. 

Stender appeared, his face as long as a horse’s, 
his eyes cold and aloof. Stender alone could 
speak on even terms with Tommy Engine. “Got 
steam up?” 

Tommy wiped water from the socket where his 
eye had been and nodded. Stender turned sav¬ 
agely toward the surface men. “Get goin’.” 
They took shovels, grasped bracing planks and 
screw jacks, went to prearranged stations. 

Dan and Laska waited. Their turn would 
come when the machine had dug space for the 
laying of the first pipe. They waited non¬ 
chalantly and watched. Dan moved a trifle 
closer to Laska. There was kinship in the aris¬ 
tocracy of subterranean men. 

173 


RIDER IN THE SUN 


Stender put his fingers to his lips and whistled 
a blast. Tommy Engine moved a casual hand. 
A lever slipped home. The machine took life, 
shook clots of clay from the agitated buckets. 
Gears growled. The boom lowered sedately into 
the earth. 

Stender whistled twice. Tommy Engine pulled 
another lever, kicked a hidden clutch. The buck¬ 
ets commenced their downward journey. Reach¬ 
ing the trench bottom, each bucket tipped over, 
drove its teeth into the clay, gouged up a mouth¬ 
ful and, turning, crawled upward on the under 
side of the boom to the surface. Five minutes 
passed. In that brief time, the machine dug a 
trench thirty feet deep, two feet wide, and four 
feet long. With each turn of its engines, the 
caterpillars carried it forward. Across the plain 
it left a scar. Men, grimy with grease and oil, 
besieged its sides, scampering in a Lilliputian 
swarm. 

Stender waved across the trench at Laska and 
Dan. He made an irrefutable downward mo¬ 
tion with his arm. They leaped to the side of 
the trench and climbed to the bottom on the cross 
braces. 

A momentous rhythm thundered in the ground, 

174 


RIDER IN THE SUN 


becoming an essential in the world of gloom at 
the slippery trench bottom. Theirs was a vast 
and pulsing job. The rhythm stirred their blood, 
like the beating of gourds in a jungle. 

Laska’s back was toward the boom, his heels 
inches from the buckets. He never so much as 
glanced at them, but when he heard the teeth 
bite he backed toward them a fraction of an inch. 
Their sound timed his progress. He kept per¬ 
fect pace, disdainful of the merciless power be¬ 
hind him. He was a machine grafted to a ma¬ 
chine. It controlled him. He depended upon 
its beat: “B-a-aroom! Boom. B-a-aroom! 
Boom.” 

Far above in the sunlight the surface men hov¬ 
ered about for signals from the toilers in the 
hole. 

“Down with a crock!” 

Two men lowered a length of pipe on a chain. 
Laska caught it, flung off the chain and wrestled 
it into place. Dan circled its end with oakum 
and stood ready to cement the joint. 

“Grade-stick!” The inspector dropped the tip 
of a long slender pole to the flow-line of the pipe. 
Dan held it in place while on the surface the in¬ 
spector sighted along his levels. 

175 


RIDER IN THE SUN 


“Aw-r-i-i-ight!” 

Dan cemented the joint. 

Every five minutes they laid a pipe, graded it 
and cemented the connection. They stripped to 
the waist, and mist rose around them. Their 
muscles strained, sweat trickled into their eyes. 
The pulse of the machine possessed them like a 
habit. “B-a-aroom 1 Boom. B-a-aroom! Boom.” 
Damp clay, cool air in aching lungs, underground 
gloom, remote voices of men above, tremors in 
the earth. Men doing things, getting somewhere. 
Men against the ground! Pipe, oakum, grade- 
stick, cement. Pipe, oakum, gradestick, cement. 
A monotory deserving of worship. 

Laska heaved at a pipe, his chest alive and 
slippery with straining. “A lousy fit,” he gasped. 

Dan passed him a sharpened spade. Laska 
tipped the pipe on end out of the way. He 
grasped the spade, preparing to shave away the 
clay and bring the pipe to level. Dan saw him 
lift the implement. He saw his torso stretch 
and tighten for a blow. Every muscle stood 
magnified. Then Laska’s foot slid on the slimy 
bottom of the trench — shot backward under the 
teeth of a bucket. 

Dan leaped upright: “Look out! Look out!” 

176 


RIDER IN THE SUN 


He saw the glinting outline of the bucket de¬ 
scending. He jumped forward, grasped Laska’s 
leg and dragged it back. His own feet went out 
from under him on the slime, and he toppled over 
Laska’s back. Laska’s slippery hands fought to 
tear him away from the teeth. He saw the 
teeth gleaming at their polished edges. He 
heard Laska’s voice roaring: 

“Stop! Stop! Stop the machine!” 

From the surface came Stender’s whistle. 
Some one shrieked. He did not know what had 
happened. He knew only that he lay on his back 
looking up at the narrow strip of surface light. 
Faces beaded with sweat stared over him. 
Hands lifted and tugged. Men breathed huskily 
around him. Beside him he saw Stender white 
with exertion. Stender’s eyes were desperate 
glowing coals. 

Laska was holding some part of the boy’s body 
from which all feeling had gone. He longed to 
say something cheerful to Laska, but he could 
not speak. Eyes, voices, the sounds of breathing 
faded out. No longer could he see the hands 
lifting and tugging. He was floating against his 
will upon a cloud. 


177 


RIDER IN THE SUN 


5 

It was as if he had been toiling up through 
a long black distance. There was no sensation 
save the strain and ache of stumbling alone close 
to the brink of another world. Laska came mi¬ 
raculously and looked at him from a sky. Dan 
saw his black hair tussling in the wind. The rush¬ 
ing of wings was in his ears, and Laska turned to 
search for the geese, lifting his hand for silence. 

He opened his eyes. The ceiling and walls 
were white, and three thin cracks in the plaster 
formed a triangle above the door. The room 
smelled clean, like a drug store. A curtain flut¬ 
tered in the breeze coming through a window. 
Below the curtain, heat waves shimmered over a 
radiator. 

Laska, gray-faced, stood by the window. It 
was good to see Laska. It was good to lie in 
the sputtering peace of steam heat. There were 
sheets on the bed, clean and cool. Tiny ridges 
showed where they had been creased and ironed. 
Dan felt dreamily contented. 

178 


RIDER IN THE SUN 


“What time is it?” 

Laska stared. “ ’Bout two o’clock.” 

“Where is this place?” 

“A hospital. You been hurt.” 

“Hurt? I don’t feel hurt.” 

“That’s good. I’m glad.” 

“What happened?” 

“You fell under the buckets.” 

Half drowsing, Dan examined and approved 
his sensations of comfort. It was dramatic to 
get hurt, and come out all right. It was dra¬ 
matic to see Alamo Laska looking serious. Only 
big events impressed Laska, like floods, and 
storms, and wars, and crawling through rat holes, 
and falling under buckets. 

Great peace saturated him. During the time 
it took a thought to swim the river of his mind, 
all things he had yearned for were contained 
within him. He was a justified miser with all 
the earth’s gold in his keeping. Some one, God 
maybe, had been good to him. His father and 
mother would listen fascinated to the things 
this some one had brought to pass in his life. 
He had sought alliance with a legendary Rider 
in the Sun, and seemed now to have him by the 
bridle, to be on the verge of wresting good secrets 

179 


RIDER IN THE SUN 


from him. He had journeyed in the company of 
great men. He had reached some strangely 
divine destination, and was so transcendingly 
happy that tears flooded his eyes. He said in a 
thin trembling voice: “I’ll have some things to 
tell them, Laska.” 

“Yeh.” 

Dan stared at the three cracks above the door. 
It was funny they should have formed a triangle. 
“The square of the hypotenuse equals the sum 
of the squares of the other two sides.” He 
sighed, testing his body, pressing deep into the 
bed. He moved his legs, but when he tried to 
move his arms, a dull terrorizing pain sprang 
up inside of him. He lurched, eyes bulging as 
he stared at the bandages on his right side. His 
face jerked convulsively. 

“Laska! My arm! My arm! It’s gone!” 


180 


Chapter Twelve 

1 

L ASKA had come to the edge of the bed and 
looked down at him, and he had calmed 
himself by Laska’s nearness, and by a steady re¬ 
gard to the cracks in the plaster. 

“I didn’t mean those things.” 

“It isn’t so bad. Look at Crip.” 

“I’ve been looking at him.” 

They smiled. 

“How long have I been here?” 

“Three days.” 

“Have you been here — all that time?” 
“Sometimes Stender was here.” 

Evidently he was a personage if Stender had 
come to watch over him. Stender and Laska, 
for three whole days! 

“You better go out now and get some rest.” 
“I don’t mind sticking around.” Laska looked 
at the window. He went over to it and looked 
out. “I might go out for a little while.” 

181 


RIDER IN THE SUN 


“I’m all right. Go ahead.” 

Laska took his hat from his coat pocket. He 
shook it into shape, and wheeled away toward the 
door. His feet shuffled and his eyes roved. 
“I’ll go over to the job an’ tell Stender you’re all 
right,” he said. “Your money’s in the safe down 
in the office.” 

“How long will I be here?” 

“The croaker said a couple weeks more.” 

“Oh.” 

Laska came over to the bed and took Dan’s 
hand. With his other hand he pulled the brim of 
his hat over his eyes, like a man preparing to run 
against the wind. 

“So-long,” said Laska. “I’ll be seeing you 
again.” His eyes were those of a man avoiding 
a beggar in a storm. 

“So-long.” 


2 


Stender came in. He was uneasy. He scru¬ 
tinized his hat which was covered with gray spots 

182 


RIDER IN THE SUN 


where blobs of cement had dried and dropped 
off. In his hand was a bag of grapes which he 
passed toward Dan. His face twisted in a fine 
relieving oath. Then he said: “Eat them Christly 
grapes. How are you?” 

Dan took the grapes. “I’m all right, Stender. 
I’m fine.” 

“Yeh?” Stender sat down in a religious-look¬ 
ing chair. “Good.” 

Dan peered at the ceiling until his eyes blurred. 
“Where’s Laska?” 

Stender reached out and took one of the grapes. 
“Over on the job.” 

“You’re fooling me. He’s gone south. I 
know he’s gone south.” 

Stender’s face stiffened in ferocious denial, 
then softened. “You might as well know it.” 

“I did know it. I could tell by the way he put 
on his hat.” 

Stender ate the grape resoundingly. “What 
the hell do you care?” 

“I don’t care at all.” 

Stender’s bony hand probed in the bag of 
grapes. He looked furtively at the boy’s band¬ 
ages which extended only a few inches below the 

elbow. 


183 


RIDER IN THE SUN 


“I’m thinking about home,” said Dan. 

Stender switched his eyes to the boy’s face. 
He seemed suddenly arrested, halted in all his 
functions, like a man holding his breath. His 
hat fell off his knee onto the floor with a soft 
sound. “Thinking about home, hey?” he said, 
and began to eat grapes in a furious uncontrolled 
way. He swallowed some of the skins. Others 
he put in his vest pocket. Sometimes he reached 
for his pipe, but when his fingers touched it he 
would see the hospital room and smell its smells, 
and he would snatch his hand guiltily away. 
Finally he got up, pulled down his coat and shook 
the folds of his pants. “Well, I got to go. 
What do you s’pose them bastards are doing over 
on the job while I’m here?” 

Dan laughed. “You better shake a leg.” 

Stender looked down upon the bed from his 
great height. His glance shifted from Dan’s 
face to the twin hillocks at the base of the bed 
where his feet lay under the sheet. He grabbed 
one of the boy’s feet and squeezed it. 

“Well, see you later,” he said. He stalked 
out through the door, stuck his head back into the 
room and mumbled something. Then he was 
gone. 


184 


RIDER IN THE SUN 


\ 


3 


He found that he could close his eyes and see 
and even feel the suppleness of the riding men. 
He could almost grasp in his hand the seamy 
splendor of Laska. He could see Laska balanced 
on his toes on the eaves of the cattle car, his broad 
back scorning a ninety-foot drop off a bridge. 
He could feel the good permanence of Bill Hatt, 
the loneliness of Soupbone. Frequently he found 
himself smiling. He was happy without asking 
why. 

No one could wrest the beauty from his mind. 
No machine could break his dreams, or cripple 
them. Within his mind lived all good things, all 
past, all future. The present alone was real, 
too transient to count. He felt suddenly that as 
long as he could be inspired by thoughts of where 
he had been and where he was going, nothing 
could injure him. This came formlessly upon 
him as a vast emotion of confidence and adjust¬ 
ment. “I can laugh at anything.” 

He began to toy with time as he had toyed 

185 


RIDER IN THE SUN 


with the joints in the sewer pipe. A nurse 
brought him newspapers. He read them lying 
upon his back. He read of war which was hid¬ 
ing all human attributes with smoke. His own 
countrymen had been fighting for months. He 
examined catalogues of dead, and devoured news 
of guns and salients. 

Some of the warriors flew in the sky in air¬ 
planes, sneering at the earth. The airmen took 
form in the boy’s mind. He loved 1 to think of 
them. He would allow himself to become in¬ 
spired with the imagined roaring of motors. He 
would deliberately place himself in the midst of 
enemy hawks and dismay them with his maneu¬ 
vering and marksmanship. Returning from the 
kingdom of these thoughts, he would ring the 
bell at his bedside and the nurse would come and 
sit smiling beside him. 

“I suppose you want to know what time it is?” 

He would laugh, laying hollow wagers as to 
the time, and when she would give him a glimpse 
of her watch, he would say: “Is it that late ? Say, 
the time went! How many days till I go home?” 

“After you sit up there’ll be just a few days 
more.” 

Sometimes when she spoke of his getting well 

186 


RIDER IN THE SUN 


and going home she would put her hand on his 
forehead and push the hair away. When she 
left him he would lie thinking of to-morrows. 
He would think of the wonderful sensation of 
sitting in a chair in positions he had been devising. 

A day came when he was told a definite time 
for dismissal, and the nurse said she would buy 
his railroad ticket for him. 

“On the fastest train there is!” 

“Yes, the very fastest.” 

He looked again at the cracks in the plaster. 

“Laska left my money in the office. You take 
it and get me that ticket.” 

She laughed and went out, and he lay think¬ 
ing of how he had earned the money. He 
thought of it as very solemn money which should 
be spent only for things like Bibles and monu¬ 
ments. 

Later, when the nurse handed him an envelope 
he tore it open with his teeth and dwelt greedily 
upon the long green strip. The nurse stood 
watching him. 

“You better let me send a message to your 
mother telling her you’re coming.” 

“No! No!” 


187 


RIDER IN THE SUN 



The nurse came with a bundle under her arm. 
“Here are your clothes. We’ve had them all 
cleaned for you.” 

He reached for them and hugged them under 
his arm. He wondered how bloody they had 
been. He opened the bundle. Everything was 
there. The boots in which he had tramped 
eternity; Soupbone’s old hat which had sheltered 
him from a hundred suns; the woolens which had 
clung to his body on a dark crawling journey. 
Here was his coat, and the nurse was reaching 
for it. 

“I’ll cut the sleeve and sew it up for you.” 

He passed it to her, and picked up his belt. 
It was a belt of broad dark leather from which 
Excalibur might appropriately hang. He closed 
his eyes and stretched. The nurse was clipping 
off the right sleeve of his coat with a pair of 
surgical scissors. He heard them cutting, and 
he grinned at the husky sound that they made. 


188 


RIDER IN THE SUN 


5 


He had said good-bye to the nurse, and she 
had kissed him. He had said good-bye to the 
doctor and walked out of the hospital into a cold 
wind to discover that children in the streets stare 
barbarously at one-armed men, while adults stare 
as barbarously in the other direction. 

He had gone out to the sewer job, and Stender 
and the barrel-chested men had gathered around 
him. Each one said or looked something which 
made him glad to be alive. Crip, the night 
watchman, grinned with sly comprehension and 
shook him by the left hand. 



He sat in a comfortable green seat in a train. 
The wheels spoke securely on the rail joints, say¬ 
ing: “Home, chuck, chuck. Home, chuck, 

189 


RIDER IN THE SUN 


chuck.” The wheels rolled him smoothly across 
flat land, over bridges, along the edges of stub- 
bled fields. Towns! Towns by the hundred 
with people walking about in them, many of them 
looking up at the train. “Home, chuck, chuck. 
Home, chuck, chuck.” 

When night came the train began to puff 
through dark familiar hills. In the dim light 
reaching outward from the car windows he could 
see near by an endless river of rocks and trees, 
trees that he knew by name and shape. He had 
sat in the shade of trees just like them. He put 
his face close to the window and looked up at 
the blue-white stars. Unless he could stare at 
the stars, the joy of familiar landscape was too 
great for him to bear. 

A stream of lights flashed by, and the roar of 
the train made his ears seem spacious. He got 
a glimpse of the name of the station — a name 
he knew, a name he had known ever since he was 
old enough to remember. 

The next station was his. “Home, chuck, 
chuck. Home, chuck, chuck.” He felt the im¬ 
pact of brakes, and as the train slowed, a great 
dignity came upon him. His feet had trudged 
enough leagues to produce tranquillity. His 

190 


RIDER IN THE SUN 


eyes had seen enough sights. He had talked 
with enough men in enough places, and he could 
return with the austerity of achievement in his 
bearing. 

There were only a few lights at the upper end 
of town. Some of the people in his car were 
asleep, sprawled on the cushions. Others sat 
like sphinxes, trying to think of nothing. A few 
reached for bundles or bags on the racks over¬ 
head. These stepped into the aisle with their 
luggage, forming a line which moved out of step 
toward the forward door of the car. Two or 
three in the line sat down on the arms of seats, 
and some sighed with weariness. 

He stepped into the aisle close against the 
man ahead. He hugged the stump of his arm 
close to his side. His left thumb hooked into 
his belt and his fingers toyed with the buckle. A 
smile was on his lips. The things he would tell 
them! The words he would use! The tone 
he would use 1 A low steady drawl like Laramie 
Jim’s. Words like Laska’s, with some of Sten- 
der’s grimness, and the granite calmness of Bill 
Hatt. 

There was a jolt. The train stopped. A 
trainman hollered something, his voice fashioned 

191 


RIDER IN THE SUN 


expressly for sad roarings. The boy stepped 
down onto the platform, and a thought came into 
him of the old lady he had seen walking in the 
rain so long ago. Up the tracks he saw signal 
lights and switch lights — green, red, yellow. 
The locomotive blew white into the night. 

He crossed the tracks and walked up the avenue 
past the drug store and the bank. He remem¬ 
bered that his grandfather had put a dollar in 
the bank for him the day of his birth. And some 
one had said if a dollar was left in a bank it would 
double in sixteen years. 

The street was deserted, silent save for the 
muffled rattle of pins in the bowling alley in the 
yellow brick block. 

He walked past the church where the minister 
had said: “Be not afraid!” Next to the church 
was the armory, and every window in its stone 
facade was militant with light. 

From across the street he saw illumined war 
posters on the entrance walls. The posters were 
red, blue and black. They showed men doing 
incredible deeds against incredible odds. They 
advertised the incredible cruelties of the enemy. 
He went over to look at them. Two uniformed 
men paced at the entrance to the building. One 

192 


RIDER IN THE SUN 


had a rifle over his shoulder. His uniform was 
new, his eyes proud. 

The boy looked hungrily at the signs: “Enlist 
now.” “Serve your Country.” For months a 
myriad mouths had been shouting in homes and 
in streets and in great cathedrals and small 
churches: “We shall go forth to war to save the 
world for democracy. This is the war to end 
war.” God must have grinned at such guileless 
perjury. 

Dan stood reading the signs and glancing now 
and then into the eyes of the soldiers. He 
yearned to be one of them, to join clannishly with 
them and to share in their boasting. He moved 
slowly toward the one who carried the rifle. He 
was about to question him about enlisting when 
he felt a tugging at his coat and looked down into 
the intense admiring gaze of an urchin. A ragged 
cap covered part of the urchin’s face, and from 
beneath it burned two dark imploring eyes. The 
urchin reached up his hand and touched Dan’s 
stump. “Was you in the war?” 

Dan’s veins went stiff. In the instant it took 
him to realize that this was a war which would 
tolerate no one-armed men, he choked back a cry 
that had sprouted in his throat and grinned 

193 


RIDER IN THE SUN 


serenely into the urchin’s eyes. This child looked 
up at him as he himself had looked at Laska, 
Laramie and the others. He was the urchin’s 
Rider in the Sun! He was the urchin’s destina¬ 
tion. He was what the urchin yearned to be. 
He winked at the child and walked swiftly away 
up the avenue. 

He turned into his own street, trying to stifle 
his excitement. He did not want them to see 
that he was excited. He was a man, and there¬ 
fore unshakeable. He had done and seen things 
worth reliving and retelling. His adventures 
were worthy of profound retrospect and solemn 
high recounting. 

What would he say first? How would he say 
it? He spoke a few experimental words aloud 
in a composite voice. It was a good voice. 
After all it did not matter much just where he 
began. They loved him passionately. They 
would listen passionately to his narrative, and 
live through all he had lived through. 

First he would open the door, happening in 
upon them in a smoke of unexpectedness, saying 
in a drawl: “Hullo, everybody.” That would 
surprise them. Then he would sit down. His 
mother would go quickly and get him something 

194 


RIDER IN THE SUN 


to eat. Then, calmly, he would tell them how 
he had ridden in dust behind a herd of cattle, the 
end of which was beyond seeing. He would tell 
of Laramie Jim, of his wild ride on Laramie’s 
horse. He would take the hat from his head, 
and, holding it toward them, say: “This is the 
hat Soupbone gave me. Soupbone is dead.” He 
would tell them of Laska’s songs, and Laska’s 
personality. He would describe the digging ma¬ 
chine, and Tommy Engine. He would tell how 
he crawled alone in the darkness which is under 
ground and nowhere else. He would tell them 
of scarred hills. He would tell them of a wind 
which blew. About a wind — 

He stopped, tilted back his head and stared up, 
up, up through the still bare branches of an elm. 
He stood listening, feeling the silence under the 
sky and in the sky and in himself. There was 
no wind! 

He started on, panting and eager. Beyond big 
elms he saw his own house, dark and quiet. 

He ran toward it. His body, no longer in 
perfect balance, lurched clumsily. Closer, closer, 
closer he came to the house. He bounded up the 
porch steps. It was very cold, and the steps 
creaked under his weight. He rattled the door 

195 


RIDER IN THE SUN 


knob. The door was locked. The door bell 
was exactly where he knew it would be, and as 
he pressed it, the sound of its ring was old in 
his ears. 

He wanted to cry out, but more than that he 
wanted them to see him standing before them 
calm and strong and controlled, incapable of the 
emotion which feasted in him. 

Upstairs a light came on, and footsteps sounded 
faintly. There was an eternity of fumbling at 
the lock from inside. Then the door opened. 
It was his mother. 

He stood rigidly before her. His lips parted 
and his eyes stared straight into hers. He tried 
to say some of the things he wanted to say. They 
had departed, leaving no hope of capture in their 
wake. The words had gone, and the wish to 
say them had gone. His voice was weak and 
husky, like the stirring of wind in old leaves. 

“Mother.” 

Before him in the faint hall light her face 
was glowingly alive. Her eyes knew that his had 
beheld life and death, that his heart knew the 
misery of disappointment and the high leap of 
hope. 

She moved half a step nearer. Her face 

196 


RIDER IN THE SUN 


grew old and white and lovely before him. Her 
arms went out to him in a profound hungering 
gesture. 

“Mother!” he cried, and rushed to her, press¬ 
ing himself against her, so that she could not 
look at him and he could see only darkness. A 
long choking sob seemed to tear him apart. 

“Mother, Mother! Oh, Mother!” 

She held him quietly in her arms. She was the 
sea. He was a small white ship at anchor. 


197 




















V. I 8 




V 


* \° O- 

o J <<• 


, -O "'’ V^V'*'* "■> 3 »°V »’'*»/ 

i V ,v - .4? 

° ^ ^ - .^tiiig, - % V s 




*, aV <p, ' s^^uiiiiijij^x ’• . V* o t t/7'^]§ r \W'^ aV*'' _ 

* * /i«r^ o.v * ^<rV ^ ^ ✓ 

* A O, *, s s A 0 V ^ ✓ 0 n . * .A. O **, 

A C » “ c ♦ *b/ .<y x«" * *, ’<P ^ c « N ‘ * "*b, 

■"oo' :MmSp* 


* * *» 



^ -' X° Of - sgsgfHr ' «5 •*■* 

* / •*%. / y s 'v^v 0 ' c . *&JW* A ■ 

) ''V'* ^ .o*’ t>*»f a . «.♦♦ 

/ 




'oo' 


Z 

r 



V r 


.$% * 

**A • "IT'S"* . - 'a-, *^mrw %■ .% 

■ 0 *v-• */;.««, V'• *" 0 *V’■ * ^ 

V A . ,rA^ A J'i' » 7 -' <. ' A 0 ° ’ A 

A\ V A Y\> 5 » ^ . J 0 jF/ff///??> + ^ 





>y o ^ Oo - 

° N 0 V°\ * * o/^. * 8 1 ' 

<* -V A^ *- % *#** 

* * 5 ? <i - * jA «0 A. \X> 

- Jv’OvM/A o *p «» 

i 2 > z 



v * 


\°°<. 


, > 


CD 

* OC 


:> V 

A 


,fi " f -T i ]p=Z ° c ,^ 5 

/,».;v^'^ 


-< 

« 
o 

* 0 N 0 ^ A®* 

V N V S 1 < 1 ^ > ^ v *° 

Sw^ ^ v w 

y o <, X ^ a O. ^ 


^ *'o cy' •?' 1 8 a- a* .-« ,>< ' i p 'o 

-o 0 ^ ^ ^ », v> 

jpo. 




. '"o o' 


A A 


-v " ’ O^ 0 ’*’••.%**'■'*' 

» - ^ - ~ ^ 

,^ v ^ 


4 - > « 


O* 

% +*. A, ^ 

/A o A 

2 <^^%rrn*S^A “ VT ^ ® 

o t» '‘k. ° 

• A V' -.'O-g •» ^ ','*£$&’* A 

^..'•"« % A^ N c° nc «A. • .0' •' 

>. V 1 *p V ® ^ ° C> V V 

^ t&JT//’*?-> ? A ^ <^NV\\ ' ' 





■>v CL - ♦ ri\ xJ<s A) r v’^ 

V * A\IV/ ° * '<? ° 

< AX\\^fFWy^Z z V z 



<5^ 

-r 

■% 

o x° tu 

- A v > 

\ CL*' ✓ -KV- ^ -0 

%** s ... , *>. * ■•> K • ’ 

* **$&!»'• ^ A 




n N C: 



A ^ 














* a\ * 

* ^ 

^ , %.} a > a xv 

^v-.c>> -' • /\ v. 0 ,\' T ‘y 

* ^.* %%* * 

; / \ 



. .. 

- ° • V \ N N V "'■< .. s' ,. 

^ ^ .‘°JL «, °o C° ' *»- ’ 

, * g ' •'- * aX k . 

"o ^ ■* ^ V' 

* r\ 


>0. a\ <G ^ 

*j- v W 

<x ^ 

r\ . A 


*S » * A W 

Y 0 * X * \ ^ 

y <° Nc * 

. * O <* _r^f'«v > <** 


\° 9 *. *• - o5 ^ * iSMIX 3 y °^ 

<#• ^yyjyjr > y^ w. ^ %- > * ^y/jM 

. % / ,, % v/;\ 

. ' * 0 ,. ' c . x > s s * ^ ^ 0 r * X * 0 f " 0 

k%^ n V +*. <. * \ ■>> Ar * k&J* A V *<* 

BfA o '-p n .o> o jQBiS - X * ccJaII A ® '*i> 
M% % T ' s '<> , £ l j r - f v - £■''&; i - v 

>Q: ‘ - -«. A. <r v » aV ,a X - i i: W o ^ ^ 


' , x * v «k ', : QW - a 

' X o>' 

4 > c« ** , 0 ^ A' 


^ ^ - A V > - 

y V 1 * W/ o N c ^ 

>> ~>/rP 7 ^ 1 . * a\ ' 

1 y ^ * 





^ aN «. 

^ o 


x°°< 



v° 

V * ->><.. ,. „ X 

%/'WGGw'' 

^ “ $SMsrW//A z 



**..,•%.'•■' v> 

^ /H, « <« AN' 

$&%&//■% ® </■ <<y - 


K/ ' -7. - v ' <r 

C, /- z % 
p=-/ ° C ■? o % 

9 * y -■ 

* v X- * 



aV </> 
,\V w 


o' 



>* 


y * .., "V* ”* °' v° Vv *. ,\' 

^ il 7 






i i lx V. 















































































































